"Translatability" is the July 2003 show at Berlinerkunstprojekt
David Adamo and Gordana Bezanov
Below are a series
of artists’ statements from the show.
C a r l o s M o
t t a
With "Untitled 117 (Bellavista)," I am interested in activating the
content of a series of photographs that represent the violent death of civilians
for political reasons. Through this I aim at questioning the conditional use
of photography, as well as the loss of human identity and human sensibilities
in regarding, from a distance, the pain of others.
I appropriated from Internet sites 117 photographs of anonymous, forgotten and
accumulated bodies extracted from massacres. I cut out their silhouettes and
mounted them over wooden boards. These photographs were turned into three-dimensional
objects. The visual relationship to these bodies changed from visual to tangible,
physical. They were de-contextualized and objectified yet individualized. Installed
on the floor each one relates to the negative space around them and to the other
116. The audience is able to walk in-between them, to touch them and lift them
up for closer examination.
____________________________
G o r d a n a B e z a n o v
Collectors Items: Un(L)abeled History, is a series of works in process. Objects
from various paths of life come together to form a new reality, a new thought.
Each object reflects a moment of my own history, yet at the same times refers
to history in general. The labels remain silent, as silence at times communicates
more than words.
____________________________
E l i s e S c h o n h o w d
My work is focused around a search for something intimately unknown. Not as a
missionary in a foreign land, but as a pilgrim in time. I harbor a great need
to return to a past to better understand the present, a return to the incidents
that left traces in my life and in the lives of people I grew up with, to rebuild
that which is broken and distorted. My work takes reference from more than one
experience, it lies in memories that have blended and faded over the years. I
hope to give old concepts a new ground in a new context. I aim at giving that
which was dead or damaged a new life.
____________________________
These small paintings of faces, some obscured, look at issues of identity and
our reliance on the visual sense. From a distance some of the faces are veiled
while in others more details are prominent. Is it possible that the faces which
are partially omitted reveal more? At least less naming occurs in these and the
gesture of the face is left to nuances and exploration.
____________________________
The State of The Union
(The Heritage of The Fathers)
K i r s t e n S t r o m b e r g
This sound piece is taken from the first half of the State of The Union Address
given by President Bush in January 2003. In order to expose the subtext of violence
and fear used in his speech, certain parts were deleted to highlight the frequency
of those languages through time. The audience’s applause, which takes up more
time than the original speech itself, remains. What is being applauded and supported
without question?
The Tyranny of Liberties
(The Family Mantle)
Working from The State of The Union piece, I was interested in questioning the
chain of oppressive thinking that not only exists in political situations, but
domestic. An overarching ideology of The United States is the protection of our
‘liberties’, but what kind of freedoms and who are what is at stake for these
so called freedoms? The guns are a warning signal: to show the potential violence
in these situations and to not ‘consume’ these images so easily but see them
for what they are.
____________________________
M a r i s a F a v r e t t o
My work describes the process of reorganizing relationships to self, place, and
other. I used the idea of a plant study to represent and define its structure
with the description of a thought process. The aim is to identifying a structure,
and to understand the displacement of thoughts and emotions in how we perceive
ourselves and the other.
____________________________
M a y a P i n d y c k
A word is born without letters. What does it look like?
Binary opposites are fascinating and deadly. Right and Wrong. Good and Bad. Liberal
and Conservative. Yes and No. Israeli and Palestinian. East and West. These are
all ways of coping. By choosing an identity for yourself and handing out identities
to others, you sticker your eyes shut. Then you think, "Ah! So I must see
the OTHER side to truly understand." No wonder you suffer from cramps.
I work to understand hard realities in a soft way. Life is not hard.
____________________________
Reem Rahim’s artwork measures the line between tangibility and impermanence,
the unnoticeable and obvious. Her American and Iraqi backgrounds have placed
her between two positions while gifting her with the ability to gently define
the dividing lines. Her work calls for us to pay attention to what we may take
for granted or simply not know, which is often overpowered by the greater desire
for self-control over fixed identity.
____________________________
S a l o m e h G r a c e
Covert Actions
In all its visual guises, the monkey has become a symbol of spectacle. It is
an anomaly, in its importance for two cultures of devotion: one devoted to a
religious doctrine, and the other devoted to bad taste. The works in Translatabiliy
are about the evolution of the monkey in spite of and in light of its seemingly
subordinate guise.
____________________________
A n d r e w S m a l d o n e
I’m interested in the contrast between reality and fiction. In this sense, photographs
and reproductions of the objects I find intriguing help fulfill my artistic needs.
I often make additions to these images or slightly alter the image itself in
one of my paintings. In this way I wish to open up a dialogue with the audience
about the ideas or theories the picture represents. For me pictures have more
dignity when they are slightly altered. I believe that in this way they can show
us things that no longer exist and help us to acknowledge our own prescence in
time.
