The act of leaving one‘s
given place and occupying another is both emotionally and
spiritually intense. Whether it is the relocation of people
or the displacement of objects, the negative or positive
charge of this movement is determined by cultural, historical,
temporal and spatial factors. Is this a common life experience
or a poetically charged site with immeasurable potential?
The artworks featured in this exhibition represent the
unpredictable personal and cultural psychological effects,
as well as the societal impacts, of relocation
and displacement. Confrontations with the new, which affect the individual
ego or a given social group, are often unexpected and astonishingly
powerful. The
tensions and frictions created by motion activate powerful energies and voltages,
and corresponding actions of resistance. Their effect-mechanisms can include
culture shock, identity crisis and other complex, refined and imponderable
elements. These are mostly invisible, even when the acts
themselves are radical.
What happens after acts of relocation and displacement?
How do these acts influence our personal lives, our mental
states, or our cultural perceptions? These questions
are relevant in the context of “local-versus-global“ intellectual
discourse, but even more so in our everyday lives, in which we constantly
seek greater mobility. Individuals and groups are relocating themselves geographically,
objects are displaced locally, data and information transferred digitally,
and
point of view refocused intellectually. How do these acts rearrange a situation,
a narrative or an ethos? What happens to these material and immaterial things
within their new contexts? How does it shift our illusions about the permanence
of things?
Some artistic responses to these questions are based on
clear personal experiences, like those of Myrna Maakaron
and Katarina Sevic. Both were urged by radical
political events, namely ongoing wars, to relocate from their home countries.
In her documentary
BerlinBeirut, Maakaron tells stories about her childhood in Lebanon, about
war, destruction, and hiding in bunkers. She also tells about her experiences
living
as an adult in Berlin. The video footage is edited to show the two different
cities as one, and Maakaron, who is shown riding her bike through the streets
in a purple dress, beautifully presents memory as a form of resistance.
Katarina Sevic humorously confronts foreign language difficulties
and administrative obstacles in her work Easy and Fast – Hungarian.
She videotaped a series of everyday conversations based on
those found in a basic Hungarian language
textbook, and exhibited this work in a Hungarian immigration office in
Budapest. Who would want to settle in this small country
with such a difficult language,
and with immigration laws that are strict even compared to those of the
US? Through her work we can sense something doubtlessly charming
in the difficulties of immigrating
to a country that historically has not attracted any immigrants.
Processes of remapping and the activities of emigrants
who relocate to big western cities aiming to find a better
life for themselves are the
basis
for projects
by BIG HOPE and Sonja Feldmeier. Re:route was a cooperation between
the BIG HOPE group (Miklos Erhardt and Dominic Hislop) and
30 individuals
in Torino,
Italy
who emigrated from Bangladesh, Bosnia, China, Congo, Ecuador, Ethiopia,
Kenya, Kurdistan, Moldova, Morocco, Nigeria, Romania, Senegal, Sierra
Leone, Somalia,
Tunisia, and Yugoslavia. The artists asked the emigrants to sketch
'mental maps' to show how they perceived and experienced
the city after a short
period of time,
and they gave each a camera so the maps could be illustrated with their
photographs.
BIG HOPE‘s project shows how relocation influences one‘s
mental and cultural perceptions, as does a work by Sonja Feldmeier
titled Pot Luck. Her
video installation shows New York-based emigrants speaking about where
they are from. Using the social act of eating as a descriptive language,
she asks participants
to sculpturally reconstruct parts of their homeland by using their
favorite food. A large video projection of these food-landscapes is
projected within a room
where visitors are invited to watch and listen to the stories while
sitting on a heated wall. This enjoyable experience is another example
of how the memory
of home can be an act of resistance.
What happens to one‘s expectations and illusions as a result of relocation?
Wang Jianwei’s documentary describes a specific process of removal from
the Sichuan province in China, a very typical story nowadays. For months he filmed
a complex of abandoned, unfinished villas in a gated community in Sichuan and
followed the illegal inhabitants of the houses, peasants who had left farm life
in order to–-unsuccessfully–-find jobs in the city. We witness their
efforts to assimilate their skills and habits into an urban context, while we
are also reminded about the consequences of centralization in overpopulated metropolises.
Individual, but not necessarily personal, experiences inspired
the works of Andrea Geyer and Moshekwa Langa. Expectations and
dreams
confront real life
in Geyer’s
half-fictional, newspaper-format diary Interim, which tells the story of a young
woman who after a long travel arrives—seemingly without purpose—in
an unknown urban space somewhere in the US. The epic narrative of this woman’s
travel intersects with strangely formulated representations of American habits
and customs.
Moshekwa Langa’s video installation is another example of this melancholy
narrative of relocation. Featuring an image of the sea as a metaphor for the
voyage, Langa’s video shows a more poetic treatment of the energy-inductive
process of relocation. His work remains enigmatic because it resides in the utopian
space of “somewhere else."
Being on the road, thus never ending the process of relocation,
seems to be a practical method of postponing the potential
losses of this
act. Ian
Burns
uses
the western road movie cliché and a cinematic trompe
l’oeil effect
to honor the idea of displacement as an enriching and enlightening state, rife
with the myth of self-discovery. His piece explores the idea that the road movie
has romanticized notions of displacement as a catalyst for insight.
The displacement of cultural objects and shared historical
narratives can have a significant impact on certain groups.
The tensions,
reactions and
new readings
caused by changes of context are investigated through the
works of Szabolcs KissPal and the artists collective Little
Warsaw.
KissPal’s installation refers
to a certain significant moment in western art history, the creation of Duchamp’s
first readymade, to query the losses and gains of a virtual relocation—a
shift in perspective. Working with reference to a well-known displacement, he
plays with the literal and abstract meanings of the term that imply something
is missing. Recalling this historical act, KissPal reminds us of the revolutionary
potential of displacement.
The INSTAURATIO! project by Little Warsaw offers a great
example of the impacts of displacement on group psyche.
Their temporary
removal and
displacement of a public monument from a small Hungarian
town to a
Dutch art museum
(Stedelijk
Museum, Amsterdam) agitated the fragile social and cultural
memory of different local communities, and evoked unexpected
scandals.
With the
interpretive
documentation
of their conceptual project, shown here, the Hungarian
artists point to the mutable nature of perception and the
fragility
of collective
identities.
The artworks and projects featured in this exhibition represent
some surprising attitudes about relocation and displacement,
and express
instinctive strategies
of resistance to their effects. The artists come from
different corners of the world and use varied artistic approaches
to examine the same
experience. All
provocatively offer answers to the questions that inspired
this show: What can be the gains of the physical and
intellectual
relocation? And, more
importantly,
can we displace our focus without losses?
Aniko Erdosi, 2006
Aniko Erdosi is an art historian and independent
curator from Budapest, now based in New York.
This
exhibition received support from the Consulate General
of Hungary in New York, Hungarian Cultural Center, and
Pro Helvetia Arts Council of Switzerland. |
