Participatory- performance, short version, was done October 1 1017, in the Research Pavilion during the Venice Biennale. Thank you Jeanette Doyle, the curator, from the Dublin School of Creative Arts.
Project (short version):
A short article appeared in Art.Es art magazine on this performance in the Jan-Feb 2018 edition.
If I’m me, who are You? Oh, so sorry. Why should anything happen to me?
Issues of “otherness,” identity, denial and history
Time: Approximately 15 minutes.
I’ll walk around the space, a dimly lighted space, with an old suitcase with high end travel stickers. I’ll be well dressed wearing costume diamond and pearl jewelry. Maybe I’ll sip some champagne. I’ll open and close the suitcase. I take off jewelry and clothes. I lie down to rest.
The cards, postcard size, has text one side and images on the front. There are 80 cards. I’ll look at them and say the text. I will then drop the cards on the floor, toss them or hand them to people.
I asked the audience to say: (1) If I am …, who are you? (2) Why should anything happen and (3) Oh, so sorry.
Material and sources:
The images are from photographs and objects that are in the public domain and under CC. The places and events represented on the cards from things that we try to push to the back of our minds. A history that some deny. A history that many want to forget. A history that others say is the past. It’s not.
The images are of fragments of laws, such as the governmental law that removed the Native Americans from lands east of the Mississippi in 1830, the Treaty of Gaudalupe Haldigo Treaty that took the west from Mexico, photographs by Ansel Adams of Japanese Internment camps, Concentration camps, Armenian Holocaust, American segregation poster removed by my grandmother from a train car in Baltimore, and the wall encircling the Palestinians and other images.
My text is based on the story of Austrian artist and writer Paul Cohen-Portheim who wrote about his experience in a British internment camp during WWI which was part of my research on enemy aliens. I discovered that my great-grandfather, Joseph Christian Gunzenhauser, was also in the wrong place at the wrong time during WWI. No one needed a passport until 1914 to travel.)
PRESS RELEASE:
The Border Pavilion
Curated by Jeannette Doyle CF Project
29/09-01/10, 2017
Research Pavilion, Venice, Italy
Artists: Anney Bonney, Stefano Cagol, Holly Crawford*, Shahram Entekhabi, Scherezade Garcia, Ferran Martin, Cleverson Oliveira, Damian Ontiveros, Nadja Verena Marcin, Rikko Sakkinen, Avelino Sala, Julia San Martin, Teresa Serrano, Celia Elsamieh Shomal, Daniel Silvo, S et P Stanikas, Carlo Zanni
“I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me”
― Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories
The Border Pavilion is a program of video works by international artists that focus on the globalgeopolitics of the border. As a component of the Research Pavilion’s thematic of engaging the Venice Biennial model of national representation in order to question the politics of its exhibition structure, The Border Pavilion extends this framework by encompassing what Edward Soja conceptualized as “ThirdSpace” and Homi Bhabha’s notion of the interstitial regarding agency in the wake of post-colonialism. That is to say, a social space and subjectivity that is syncretic and protean and foundational for an empowered and emancipatory political imaginary.
*Apart from the video exhibition, there will be a live performance by Holly Crawford at the Research Pavilion titled, If I’m, who are You? Oh, so sorry. Why should anything happen to me?