After the first show in Bangkok, Survival Techniques: Narratives of Resistance will open in Chicago on April 12th, 2011 at the Museum of Contemporary Photography.
The exhibition focuses on artists creating works that reflect the way individuals react to situations arising from conflicts in ideologies and the collapse of communication in the context of nationalism, ethnicity and power. We plan to exhibit the work of Yto Barrada, Phil Collins, Raphael Dallapota, Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh, Rainer Ganahl, Li Mu, MKR Palash, Navin Rawanchaikul, Julika Rudelius, Lina Saneh, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Tintin Wulia, Zhang Peili, Philippe Laleu and Artur Zmijewski. The work is a mix of video, photography and installation.
The exhibition Survival Techniques: Narratives of Resistance looks at artists who are creating works that reflect the way individuals react to situations arising from conflicts in ideologies and the collapse of communication when thinking about nationalism, ethnicity, and power, whether dealing with issues of displacement and exile or the struggle to exist within a state of flux within one’s own self-identified place of being.
The genesis of this project is a personal reflection by curator Davide Quadrio during the political unrest in Thailand from 2008-2010 and the severe distress it caused to him and his family while living there and to the nation and its people. With the revolutions in the Arab world, we have continued to see civil resistance involving various measures such as demonstrations and rallies to express dissatisfaction with existing authoritarian regimes. However, the situations in Thailand and the Arab world and the reactions of its people are not unique. History bears witness to ways that individuals, groups of people, races, and nations survive in a time of social unrest and political uncertainty.
Taking the poetry and the power of imagery as the starting point, Survival Techniques looks closely at the layers of artistic creation, revealing an artist’s quest to reveal his or her truth, whether fictional or manipulated. The individual works are chosen for their capacity to comment on the specific themes addressed in the exhibition while connecting, echoing and in dialogue with the other works on view increasing their potential effect. Moving through the exhibition, geographies collapse into a generic and unnamed world revealing how art can expand local specificity into universal concepts that are the mirror of our era in the flux of human history.
This exhibition is co-organized by Natasha Egan, Director and Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago (MoCP) and Davide Quadrio, co-founder of Arthub Asia, a cultural and artistic constellation of independent thinkers devoted to contemporary art creation in China and across Asia. A selection of works for this exhibition is from the FarEastFarWest collection on extended loan to the MoCP. FarEastFarWest commissions and collects challenging artworks that conceptually describe contemporary Asia and its role in the world.
Artists (preliminary list)
Yto Barrada (France, lives in Morocco, b. 1971)
In the last twenty years the Strait of Gibraltar has become one of the main gateways for illegal immigration in North Africa. Barrada’s photographs capture the temptations of leaving, and the unfulfilled hopes of escaping into Europe.
Phil Collins (United Kingdom, b. 1970)
The meaning of style (2011) is a short film based on the skinhead culture in Kuala Lumpur, the capital and largest city in Malaysia. It tells the story of a young man watching a film of a subculture considered rebellious but their behaviors have nothing to do with the ideology marked by the culture. The group of skinheads is portrayed as a social exercise codified with rituals emptied of the political rightwing meanings but still referred to them in their masculine essence.
Raphaël Dallaporta (France, b. 1980)
Domestic Slavery (2010) is a work of hidden resistance. Banal photographs of the facades of wealthy apartment buildings symbolizing urban luxury are accompanied by long captions that reveal the devastating truths of contemporary slaves that worked with the families that live in these places.
Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh (Germany/Lebanon)
While working in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh encountered an extraordinary woman who brought a collection of personal photographs with her into the camp that define a history of the pre-war period. Eid-Sabbagh has begun to analyze the woman’s “collection” and develop a project that re-traces, with sensitivity, the woman’s situation and her ability to bare witness to a cruel reality with neither pathos nor over-sensationalism.
Rainer Ganahl (Austria, lives in United States, b. 1961)
Rainer Ganahl’s I Hate Karl Marx (2010) video depicts a German woman expressing her discontent and opposition in Chinese to a statue of Karl Marx on Karl Marx Allee in the year 2045 when the international language is now Chinese.
Li Mu (China, b. 1974)
Blue Books (2008-2009) is a project that explores the intimate reality of teenagers serving sentences at the Shanghai Juvenile Reformatory. The artist offered his own art books (displayed on a shelf in the Reformatory) as a temporary gift to the teenagers. The teenagers are eager to communicate with, learn, and earn trust from the outside world and these books are the bridge to it. Art books can transcend the constraints of different languages, educational background, and age. Reading these books have the capability of gaining a deeper understanding of freedom, goodness and creativity and this was part of the weekly discussions between the artist and the teenagers. The work is a series of portraits and documentation collected during the year long collaboration. The color blue both represents the sky and ocean and represents freedom, purity and peace which the artist aspires to have his reader reach but it is also the color of the teenagers’ uniforms. In this formal yet symbolic work the project can be read (especially in contemporary China) as a moment of reflection on the absurdity of human destiny.
MKR Palash (Bangladesh)
Liberation War Bangladesh, 1971 (2010) is a photographic series inspired by the homonymous 1971 Liberation War. After 41 years the memories of the people who sacrificed their life for their country and for those who were tortured and went through physical violence are omnipresent but forgotten by the young generation. When Palash was a child he heard stories of the war from his relatives, in particular from his father who was a Freedom Fighter. As an adult Palash felt a sense of guilt for missing this heroic time and created a series of fictional photographs that encapsulate the memories and stories he heard. Facts are filtered by his staged reconstruction and digital manipulation.
Navin Rawanchaikul (Thailand/Japan b. 1971)
In Hong Rub Khaek (Khaek Welcome) conceptual artist Rawanchaikul steps into the living rooms of seven Indian migrants living in Chiang Mai, Thailand. He explores with touching kindness the world of Indian/Thai families, their lives and stories and open our imagination to an unexpected view of Thailand. “They are all from my parents’ generation, each with memories of how the partition disrupted the lives of their families and their journey to Thailand,” he says. “Art has given me a chance to understand their stories and make sense of my family’s history. Through this, I get a better insight into my past.”
Sigalit Landau (Israel, b. 1969) Azkelon, 2011
“I filmed people playing the “knife” game. Azkelon is a hybrid of Aza (Gaza) and Ashkelon. These two towns share a beach but are separated by a border. The Gaza strip is one of the most crowded districts in the world, populated mostly by refugees; Ashkelon was conceived by Jewish immigrants from Arab countries. From my point of view, young people on both sides play this “game”. Where there is play - there is life. It is an agreement to simple rules: they may win, they may lose; the interaction is possible interaction.”
Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand, b. 1970)
In the course of conducting research for the feature film Uncle Boonmee (Cannes winner 2009), filmmaker and artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul visited and worked in the north-east of Thailand close to the Laotian border. The village of Nabua was heavily occupied by the Thai army for two decades from the 1960s to the early 1980s in order to curb those who were accused of being communists, and was a place of fierce oppression, fighting and violence. Many men disappeared leaving the village dominated by women and children. This reality echoed an ancient legend about a widow ghost who abducts any man who enters her empire making Nabua’s nickname Widow Town. As the Cold War ended, reconciliations were made and the Communist Party of Thailand withered away. The government played down the violence and quickly the public began to forget about the disappeared, leaving the young generation oblivious to this past. In his photographic series Ghost Teen, Weerasethakul spent two months in Nabua documenting the teenagers’ activities and creating fictional scenarios in order to implant a collective memory.
Tintin Wulia (Indonesia, b. 1972)
The Most International Artist (2011) is an ongoing project by the artist playing with matters of identity and survival. In a playful way the artist crafts and collects passports from around the world and creates evolving time-based installations, short films or filmed performances and actions. The freshness and poetry of Wulia’s work is counterbalanced by the reflection of ethnical limitations, borders and the drama of human injustice.
Zhang Peili (China, b. 1957)
The dual-screened video Happiness (2006) juxtaposes a man speaking about political and social greatness in chopped rhetorical sentences on one screen while people applaud enthusiastically on the other screen commenting on the universal efficiency and drama of political populism.
Artur Zmijewski (Poland, b. 1966)
In his films and photographs Arthur Zmijewski investigates social norms by observing unusual or invented situations. He often adapts the strategies of political action in his work and documents the reactions. Sculpture Plein-air. Swiecie (2009), documents a workshops organized by Zmijewski in which seven artists from different parts of Poland collaborate with steel workers in Swiecie, Poland to make a public sculpture. Modeled on a similar collaboration between artists and workers in Elblag, Poland, in the late 1960s, which was inspired by utopian goals of a classless society, Zmijewski highlights the social and political realities that separate people today.
Philippe Laleu (France, 1964)
In the show we present the work called Mère nature et ses enfants, Mother Nature and her children (2011)
A multi media piece, photography and video. This work re-group archival documents, photos took by the artist and an interview- video work. Thailand is well known as to be a particularly tolerant country, especially because its Buddhist cultural and religious back-ground. From the beginning of my stay in Thailand twelve years ago, i have been fascinated by a phenomenon of the third sex. I so decided to re-organize all the information I collected throughout the years, adding images e a long interview with a friend a katoi ( term used in Thailand to describe and call transsexual people). This recherché is then display on a long narrative of images, texts and sketches.
Julika Rudelius (Germany/Netherlands) (this piece TBC)
Rudelius’ video installations provide insights into attitudes and practices within a selected group. She deals with prejudices and stereotypes that determine our daily behavior and are the foundation of our social coexistence. One of Us (2010) is about the love between idealized couples. This work shifts the background concept of the entire exhibition into the realm of the private. The video is charged with passion, incomprehension, arguments and fragility. It is the nature place where the subject explores the basic technique of survival, often denied or hidden to the outside world but not less dramatic and existentially fundamental.
Uriel Orlow, (Canada)
The starting point of Yellow Limbo ( HD video with stereo sound, 14′, 2011) is an extra-ordinary episode which has all but disappeared from official histories; namely, the failed passage of fourteen international cargo ships through the Suez Canal on 5 June 1967. Caught in the outbreak of the Six-Day War between Israel and Egypt, Jordan and Syria, the ships were only able to leave the canal in 1975 when it re-opened. While stranded for eight years, the cold-war political allegiances of the multi-national crews were dissolved and gave way to a form of communal survival and the establishment of a social system. This involved the organisation of their own olympic games in 1968, amongst other activities.
Special Film Screening
Three films will summarize and symbolically describe the individual and social survival that humanity faces as individuals, couples, and as a community. A solitude-portrait of artist and activist Ai Weiwei is described in the documentary Before Ai Weiwei (1994) by Daria Menozzzi. A narrative on the distortion of social behaviors in closed communities struggling to reach an understanding of what remains of inexplicable suffering is the focus of Enemies of the People (2010) by Thet Sambath and Rob Lemkin.
Before Ai (1995) a documentary by Daria Menozzi, Premier
The intimate interview held in Beijing in 1995 by director Daria Menozzi presents an unexpected Ai Weiwei. Just back from the States, the artist explains his idea of contemporary art, his work in relationship to Beijing and China which were both to be re-discovered by the artist. Before his greatness was revealed to the world, this unique portrait of an artist struggling to position himself in an estranged world yet to become the overwhelming power of today strikes for its frankness, simplicity and fragility revealed.
Enemies of the People (2010) by Thet Sambath and Rob Lemkin
The Khmer Rouge ran what is regarded as one of the twentieth century’s most brutal regimes. Yet the Killing Fields of Cambodia remain unexplained. Until now. In Enemies of the People the men and women who perpetrated the massacres – from the foot-soldiers who slit throats to the party’s ideological leader, Nuon Chea aka Brother Number Two – break a 30-year silence to give testimony never before heard or seen.
Unprecedented access from top to bottom of the Khmer Rouge has been achieved through a decade of work by one of Cambodia’s best investigative journalists, Thet Sambath. Sambath is on a personal quest: he lost his own family in the Killing Fields. The film is his journey to discover not how but why they died. In doing so, he hears and understands for the first time the real story of his country’s tragedy. After years of visits and trust-building, Sambath finally persuades Brother Number Two to admit (again, for the first time) in detail how he and Pol Pot (the two supreme powers in the Khmer Rouge state) decided to kill party members whom they considered ‘Enemies of the People’.
