Archive for the ‘2009’ Category
The Exotic Human. Other cultures as amusement
Sexy & Dangerous, 1996. Transparency on acrylic 183x121cm
The Exotic Human. Other cultures as amusement Teylers Museum, Haarlem, Holland, and Museum Dr. Guislain, Ghent, Belgium.
Klulsy Lamko review ‘Exotic Man‘ in the Power of Culture.
What with the creationists and the evolutionists, prejudice decidedly still has a lot of life left in it. An intriguing question, the origin of man! As part of its tricentenary celebrations, from January to May 2009 the Teylers Museum in Haarlem is hosting ‘Exotic Man: Other Cultures as Entertainment’. The exhibition, which brings together posters, photographs, masks, colonial objects, sculptures, documentaries, books, etc. in a formal post-modern perspective, boldly returns to the theme of the perception of Otherness as promulgated for centuries in Europe. Tribes of Africans, Indians, Aboriginees, Greenlanders, Samoans and Pakistanis, huts, forests, temples, slavery, the 1897 Colonial Exhibition in Tervuren, scientific expeditions, craniometry, anthropometry, the Hottentot Venus, the colour chart, DNA – in a word, biology, culture and history – are cheerfully jumbled together, revealing the commonalities on which racism, slavery, colonisation and apartheid were founded. In a nutshell, Others, because they are different, are animals, or almost: they are in a state of nature, ugly, bizarre, comic, savage, violent, devoid of reason, cannibals – in a word, for all these reasons, exotic!
What is the purpose of such a daring exhibition on this sensitive subject? The answer is complex. To hold up a mirror, to confront us with our own history? The aim of educating and reminding us is undoubtedly laudable. Indeed, if it invites us to look twice, in other words to examine the unhealthy, hierarchical, destructive attitude to Others, if it leads us to question the stupidity of pseudo-scientific attempts at racial characterisation and hierarchal organisation, if it elicits from visitors not an amused smile (short of an unusual capacity for self-ridicule) but a grimace of disgust, we can feel reassured.
Conversely, if, instead of being perceived as a scathing denunciation, the exhibition confirms visitors in their stereotypes, it would be monstrous. There is nothing against being entertained, but because of the multiple meanings that images can have, a good deal of care is called for in the way objects are presented (in this case a unilateral point of view, lifeless legends, heterogeneity, etc.) – especially when conjuring up the muddy swamp where human thought has become bogged down in justifying atrocities. It is not so long since the colonial era when, by dint of imposing rules and measuring legs and noses, the social categories Tutsi and Hutu were transformed into rival ethnic groups, thus laying the foundation for the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda. James Watson’s racist arguments are still current. There is still a danger of being drawn into a progression: “you become a scientific profile, a negroid type, an anthropological debate, a photographic subject”.
Koulsy Lamko is a writer and university lecturer from Chad
Danger Of Authority – woodblock making process. 2009
Brook has worked with master woodblock carver and printer Kitamura Shiochi from Kyoto. Kitamura is working in Brooks studio in Melbourne throughout late October and November 2009.
This new work is part of the print exhibition ‘Danger Of Authority’ at Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne in November-December 2009.
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- Example of woodblock print one third finished
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- Brook and Kitamura
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- Kitamura blending ink on block with brush
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- Kitamura blending ink on block with brush
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- Kitamura inking a block
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- Inking block
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- Carving an extra section
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- After rubbing
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- Printed half-way
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- Rubbing paper on inked block
8 Months Of War – A Public Archive
In May 2009, DETACHED resident artist Brook Andrew begun an 8 month community interactive archive and study space linking ideas of war with both the personal and popular. 8 Months Of War presents eight display cabinets presenting a snap shot of real time from May through to December 2009. After all, when are ‘we’ not at war?
The artist sees the site of DETACHED in a renovated colonial church as a sacred place for thinking about conflict and a place to ponder and reflect. In many ways, this project is a memorial in a site of religious history. Some who visit may bring flowers to lay at the entrance of the installation or light a candle in memory. Then proceed to the mezzanine levels and add to the growing public archive.
The basis of this ongoing experimental work in progress aims for the public to assist in providing both the materials and activism and growth of this installation/performance. Ranging from two dimensional archives that include photocopied, photographic and books connecting different cultures and expressions of war and conflict. MAY has begun and expresses the popular Gallipoli, the mainly unknown historical Military conflicts like The Black Line in Tasmania, tourism newspaper advertising of the pyramids link with First World War photographs of troops on camel trips and the pyramids, to current tabloid articles on conflict comparing footballers and women to the Taliban. Red string is used as a hyper-link connecting ideas, i.e. a photographic portrait from an early settler family in Tasmania to photocopied images of the extinct Tasmanian Tiger and the Franklin Dam demonstration slogans.
The aim: you, the public, enter DETACHED and join the dots, forming your own connections as you like. Sit and think and comment, write a message, post a family portrait on the wall or write a story then cut a length of red string; link one idea to another, trace a line through space. 8 Months Of War is after all a metaphor for the ongoing trials of disaster through passions inflicted on our fellow human beings, animals and planet alike. The end may be a sea of red cotton cutting lines through the visitors’ multitude personal comments. The red cotton creating a mind field or barbed wire, encircling the thought of war. And below on the ground level, lay reefs, flowers and light a candle in commemoration or protest.
Visit:
http://www.8monthsofwar.com : Web site launched July 2009
Brook Andrew : Eye to Eye
Asialink and MUMA have joined forces to tour this major survey of one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists through south and southeast Asia during 2008 and 2009: Starting with Yuchengco Museum, Manila on 24 July 2008, and Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore on 7 November 2008.
Andrews, whose talents lie in his unique ability to marry aesthetics with complex conceptual and theoretical questions, addresses a range of subject matter, from the poetics of space, the spectacle of light and sight to the pressure of historical consciousness.
Brook Andrew: Eye to Eye is an exhibition that spans the artist’s practice over the past decade, encompassing a diverse range of disciplines, including photography, printmaking, sculpture and neon installations. This major survey of Andrew’s work interrogates the politics of difference and the implications of ‘the gaze’. Eye to eye and across land and cultures, Andrew explores the promising yet fractured grounds of our contemporary intercultural engagement. Reflecting equally on global mass media and traditional grass-roots aesthetics, the artist asks us to consider the construction of history and power, invisibility and identity — in its patina of black, white and shades of grey.
This exhibition has been developed by the Monash University Museum of Art and is supported the Australian Government through the Australian Visual Arts Touring Program of the Australia International Cultural Council, an initiative of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and the Australia Council, the Australian Government’s arts funding and advisory body and The Visual Arts and crafts strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Goverments.
CURATOR: Geraldine Barlow, curator/collection manager, Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA)
typical! Clichés of Jews and Others
typical! Clichés of Jews and Others The Jewish Museum
Jewish Museum Berlin – 20 March to 3 August 2008
Spertus Institute Chicago – 26 September 2008 to 18 January 2009
Jewish Museum Vienna – 7 February to 21 June 2009
»typical! Clichés of Jews and Others« is an exhibition about the stereotyped
seeing, perceiving, and compartmentalizing of images and objects.
Stereotypes and clichés are an integral part of our perception that shape
our image of ourselves and of “others” and our sense of belonging to a group
or a nation separate from other groups and nations. It’s impossible to
imagine pop culture without characterizations and classifications, which
through their simplification help us to overcome our fear of the unknown,
but at the same time can also provide us with a breeding ground for racist
ideologies.
