BY ARTIST AND ROOM
Nico Angiuli
Born in 1981 in Adelfia (Italy). Lives and works in Bari (Italy).
Tre Titoli, 2015
Video installation: HD video, 32 min
Courtesy the artist
Historical events and political experiences about the past rural life of Cerignola, the city that gave birth to the important figure of the anti-fascist union leader Giuseppe Di Vittorio (1892-1957), live again and intertwine in this work by Nico Angiuli, the expression of a two year long study on the cyclical nature of the violence and several months of fieldwork in a territory of southern Italy infamous because of the phenomenon of caporalato (recruitment of day laborers) and the exploitation of illegal immigrants as farm hands. In an attempt to give an answer to or at least pose questions and anomalies that may be found on a scale that is anything but local, Nico Angiuli encourages a process of discovery, investigation and re-enactment founded on the heterogeneous cultural and social heritage made available by institutional figures, free citizens and “new residents”, in particular those of the Ghanaian community settled in the area of Tre Titoli, involved by the artist in a series of workshops leading to the construction of a choral film narrative whose fictional nature is the result of the contribution of each participant in conceiving and writing the screenplay as much as in the acting.
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Juan Pedro Fabra Guemberena
Born 1971 in Montevideo, Uruguay. Lives and works between Stockholm and Berlin.
Work I
∞ (Circuit), 2015
Intervention in public space over the city of Kyiv with signal-mirrors.
Courtesy of the artist
∞ (Circuit) reimagines the city of Kyiv through a most elementary form of telecommunication: light. With the help of signal-mirrors the Swedish artist and Uruguayan exile Juan Pedro Fabra Guemberena and seven human nodes in the “circuit” will redraw, reimagine, reconquer public spaces of the city and also renegotiate how and what can be communicated. The signal-mirror offers a poetic temporary structure that rapidly can become subversive.
The participants of the project will explore the rooftops of the city, and take positions and cross lines as part of an infinite circuit of play, of feedback, of instantaneous togetherness. An artwork with manifold mnemonic symbolism in the aftermath of the events of the Maidan, it is an invitation to a form of collective reimagination on the premises of boundaries, visibles, invisibles, and temporalities.
Commissioned by Perpetuum Mobile for The School of the Displaced, supported by IASPIS and Nordic Culture Point.
Work II in VCRC
NOVIEMBRE
An ongoing archeological/emotional project
NOVIEMBRE is a comprehensive term for this ongoing archeological/emotional project made up of different parts of history, fiction and geographical displacements. Through documents, collages, videos and sound it aims to retell a personal journey in progress.
Work II.i
Juan-Pedro y Vania van a pasear al zoologico (Juan-Pedro and Vania go to the Zoo), 1974
Handmade book by Galia Guemberena, wrapping paper, metallic paper, thread, pen, on cartonboard 130 x 16cm, double-sided
Fabra Guemberena’s mother was engaged in the urban guerilla activity against the authoritarian regime in Uruguay during the 1970’s. The starting point of NOVIEMBRE is a letter from the artist’s mother to him as a child, in the format of a children’s book that she created out of reused wrapping-paper while incarcerated in 1973:
Juan Pedro
My dear son:
I still can’t see you and that’s why
I send you this book.
When you are older I will write another book
to tell you about all the important work
I had to do during these days that we didn’t meet.
See you soon
I send you many kisses
Mother”
Work II.ii
Tia Gladys (Aunt Gladys), 2014.
HD Video, 6’27”
A portrayal of the artist’s mother’s aunt who, like her, sang songs. Here she recites and sings “The daughter of Juan Simon” and with it, goes through the agonizing process of reconciliation with death.
Work II.iii
El Gurrumino, 2014
Installation wall: magazines, ink, tape, paper
570 x 390 cm
“El Gurrumino” is the name of a lullaby which Fabra Guemberena’s mother used to sing him to sleep with after the family had been forced into European exile. The lullaby is translated into a large-scale collage-drawing, composed of pages from fashion-, design-, lifestyle- and pornographic magazines, heavily stained over by the use of felt-pen, which are put together like a patchwork quilt.
Fabra Guemberena’s mother made no distinction between political battle-songs and traditional lullabies like the one about “El Coco” (the Boogeyman) taking children in the night. These songs became particularly relevant and terrifying during the era of military dictatorships in Latin America. They also had the power of bridging two separated worlds and momentarily erasing the harsh experience of exile.
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Ahmet Öğüt
Born in 1981 in Diyarbakır (Turkey). Lives and works in Amsterdam, Berlin and Istanbul.
Oscar William Sam, 2012
Video installation: Single channel full HD video, 4′
Courtesy the artist
The video was filmed on the 12th of November 2011 at the tent camp in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, the epicenter of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The title is suggestive of the acronyms often used by law enforcement services and military forces to identify and single-out individuals. In the video, a hand points out across the Occupy Wall Street camp, identifying individuals one by one, calling out the most popular first names in US. The identity and goal of the video’s main protagonist remains unclear. Oscar William Sam alludes to the supposed anonymity of those involved in protest movements and the shifting terrain between power and impotence, perpetrator and victim.
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Marina Naprushkina
Born in 1981 in Minsk. Lives and works in Berlin.
Dead Souls / German Money and Migration Politics in the World, 2014
Wall painting
Courtesy the artist
Refugees’ Library, 2013-2015
Booklets
Courtesy the artist
The Refugees’ Library is an archive of court sketches on the topics of asylum and migration. Every booklet depicts court proceedings that have actually taken place (the names of the people involved have been changed). Our main intention is to make the library available to refugees as a means of informing themselves in preparation for their own court proceedings. More than 20 free translators are involved in the project, making the booklets available for readers in a number of different languages.
Marina Naprushkina (courtroom sketches). Translators (9 languages): Tobias Weihmann, Nele Van den Berghe, Leaticia Kossligk, Markus Baathe, David Ey, Anna Toczyska, Charlotte Stromberg, Judith Geffert, Sara Dutch, Sarah Neis, Josie Nguessi, Anouk De Bast, Bojana Perišić, Elvira Veselinović, Ruth Altenhofer, Inara Gabdurakhmanova, Friederike Großmann, Christiane Clever, Zoë Miller, Lydia White, Paul Girard, Marie-Charlotte Ricarda Deyda, Leonhard Elias Klank, Solenn Guillou, Joan Somers Donnelly, Enrico Boccaccini, Samaneh Asadi Nowghabi.
Commissioned by The School of Kyiv – Kyiv Biennial 2015, supported by SHIFT Basis.Kultur.Wien.
Forthcoming in late September / early October
The wall painting Dead Souls shows the enlargement of the EU borders and key provisions relating to its asylum and migration policy. For six decades of successful reconciliation policy, the European Union has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. But what kind of peace does the EU make? The EU’s failed asylum policy leads to serious economic and social inequalities. The EU wants to win the markets in the refugees’ home countries, but limits the free movement of persons. The borders are so sealed that asylum seekers actually barely reach ‘the safe shore.’ In 2004 a ‘Defence Army’ of the EU called Frontex was created, whose job is to ensure that the refugees are ‘pushed back’. Frontex ’advances‘ the EU’s external border to the Sahara, to the Turkish-Iranian border, or deep into Ukraine.
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Dzamil Kamanger
Born in 1948 in Mariwan, in Kurdish Iran. Lives and works in Helsinki.
Finnish Passport, 2015
Bead knitting, 50 x 45 cm
From the series Fake Passports are Always Handicraft
Courtesy of the artist
Ukrainian Passport, 2015
Bead knitting, 50 x 45 cm
From the series Fake Passports are Always Handicraft
Courtesy of the artist
Dzamil Kamanger’s works combine traditional Central Asian craft skills with modern themes. These two beadworks use a traditional Kurdish bead-knitting technique to make a Finnish and a Ukrainian “passport”. A “good” passport, which many western Europeans take for granted, can get you into almost any country, while carriers of other documents often have radically different experiences. As a political refugee and Iranian Kurd, Kamanger speaks from personal knowledge. He received his Finnish nationality after living and working in Finland 15 years. These two new works, made expressly for the School of the Displaced at the Kyiv Biennial 2015, are part of the series Fake Passports are Always Handicraft, an ironic reference to the traditional techniques of counterfeiting travel documents.
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Ray Langenbach
Born in the USA in 1948. Lives and works in Malaysia and Finland.
Habeas Corpus: Kyiv, 2015 – on-going
Ongoing performative-juridical intervention
Courtesy of the artist and David A. R. Ross
Ray Langenbach’s work is a close collaboration with David A. R. Ross, who until recently was a bank examiner, auditor and attorney at one of the highest courts in the United States. It unravels Ross’s 29-year investigation into a child trafficking ring intertwined with a “coffee fund” involving billions of dollars at the Bank of Commerce and Credit International. In 2006, Austrian, Belgian, and US police traced this child trafficking ring to a Maryland courthouse. Hundreds of children passed through Helsinki to the USA, from a dozen European countries including Ukraine.
After threats to his life and the deaths of witnesses and professionals involved in the case, Ross fled the US twenty-one months ago for Finland. Humanitarian Protection was denied. Since then, he has been deprived of his passport, bank, insurances, professional license and civil rights and is slated for deportation in September, 2015.
The former auditor and attorney’s new identity as an artist opens channels for his legal existence. Langenbach’s work raises questions of epistemology, legal ontology and performative effect, via public scrutiny of a radically juridically-displaced person.
Commissioned by Perpetuum Mobile for The School of the Displaced.
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The ZIP Group
Eldar Ganeev. Born in the Belorussian SSR in 1975.
Stepan Subbotin. Born in Krasnodar in 1987.
Vasily Subbotin. Born in Krasnodar in 1991.
Evgeniy Rimkevich. Born in the Krasnodar region in 1987.
The ZIP Group lives and work in Krasnodar, Russia.
Work 1.
Free Construction, 2015
Practical, participatory architecture
This new architectural construction and participatory platform in public space is being developed in direct cooperation with the Frolivska 9/11 centre for “first help” for internally displaced persons (IDPs) from eastern Ukraine. With the practicality, artistry, humour and immense speed characteristic of the ZIP Group, this new architectural work will rise to the needs of the moment and remain in place following the departure of the artworld hubbub. What is needed is a permanent roof to cover a IDP children’s playground in winter. An artworld platform for events, debates, concerts and plays will also arise, as well as a large-format outdoor cinema with chairs and furniture. In the course of the opening days, ZIP’s workshops will invite IDPs to learn the multi-faceted tricks of the trade, so that for long afterward, wherever they find themselves displaced to, the Free Construction can continue to be constructed.
Commissioned by Perpetuum Mobile for The School of the Displaced, supported by Nordic Culture Point.
Work 2 in the VCRC
Free Constructions
Installation, dimensions variable
The ZIP Group’s work in the gallery of the VCRC relates their artistic vision to their practical and participatory architectural constructs at Frolivska 9/11 (above), and seeks to engage artworks in the space of art with the spaces of Kyiv’s population of internally displaced persons (IDPs).
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Halil Altındere
Born in 1971 in Mardin (Turkey). Lives and works in Istanbul.
Wonderland, 2013
Video installation: HD video, 8′
Courtesy the artist and Pilot Gallery, Istanbul
The video entitled Wonderland is a document of the anger, resistance and hope voiced by the children of Sulukule, a neighbourhood of Istanbul which for six centuries was home to the Roma population of the city and their culture, but which was demolished as a result of a decision made in 2006 as part of an urban transformation project. The work, which features the artist using a new cinematic language that oscillates between video clip and video-art for the first time, displays how one subculture (hip-hop) can flourish and live within another subculture (Roma). As the prosperity promised by the TOKİ homes built in place of their neighbourhood demolished by the municipality ends up serving nothing more than social inequality, poverty and infrastructural problems, the deep-rooted life-style of the people of Sulukule, shaped by music and dance, faces oppression and irreversible corrosion. Istanbul’s adventure of concretization, gentrification and “hygienization”, is voiced by the group Tahribad-ı İsyan and accompanied by Altındere’s visuals which land like a punch to the stomach, producing a dreamlike reality that is difficult to digest, and to forget.
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Núria Güell
Born in 1981 in Virdreres (Spain) and lives in Barcelona
Stateless by choice. On the prison of the Possible. Spain, 2015
Installation: photo-print, documents
Courtesy the artist and ADN Galeria, Barcelona
Nationality is conceived as the quality that confers to a person the fact of belonging to a national community that is organized as a state. This project emerges from the artist’s alienation from the structure of the nation-state, and from her rejection of the construction of the self in relation to a national identity she considers as fictional and imposed. In order to achieve the status of stateless by choice, the artist conducts a legal dialogue with the state, based on the principle of individual self-determination. After appealing, frustratingly, to various organs of the state, Nuria Güell worked with a lawyer to study the Spanish and European legislation relating to her nationality, concluding that there is no possibility for an individual to choose to reject ‘its’ nationality; the law only addresses loss of nationality as a punishment.
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