| It may be
that writers….exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by
some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at
the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look
back, we must also do so in the knowledge – which gives rise to
profound uncertainties- that our physical alienation…almost inevitably
means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely that thing
that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual
cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands…of the
mind.
….It may be argued that the past is a country, from which
we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity
-- Salman Rushdie (1)
Imaginary Homelands: Reconstituted Narratives in the Digital
Landscape is an exhibition exploring the notion of "homeland"
within the context of the transience, portability, and flexibility
of digital media. The exhibition includes the work of a diverse
group of nine artists who investigate this subject using digital
media ranging from photographic and video methodologies to interactive
virtual environment installations. Each artist presents a strong
personal, political or psychological discourse on the preservation,
reflection, exploration, and longing for a home that may or may
not be actual. The works presented are created by artists from
Ghana, Latvia, Israel, Malaysia, Spain, America, Brazil, and Bulgaria.
The title is taken from Salman Rushdie's collection of essays
and criticism of the same name - his ten-year personal and intellectual
odyssey that records the politics and irony of culture, film,
religious fundamentalism, racial prejudice, and the preciousness
of the imagination and free expression. The common theme seen
throughout the work included in the Imaginary Homelands exhibition
is coping with transience, a topic that is especially relevant
in our current times of displacement, globalization, and the turmoil
of unresolved conflicts worldwide..
Imaginary Homelands presents combinations of traditional
and digital techniques. The show is intended to inspire artists
to explore new forms of expression for the future. It is the very
slipperiness of our digital storehouses that so wonderfully reflects
our own impermanence, while at the same time they promise us the
immortality of Lyotard's notion of thought existing without a
body and more appropriately here without a permanent physical
home.(2)
Kofi Amponsah, an artist and educator from Ghana, lives
in Albany, NY and is currently working on his doctoral thesis
at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York (RPI). Kofi
presents an interactive installation that merges the 5' x 4' physical
hardwood loom that he brought from Africa, with an interactive
spatial narrative containing photographs of his native land. He
views the use of digital technologies as integral to stimulating,
promoting, and preserving the traditional African art form of
weaving "Kente" cloth, whose origins trace back to ancient
West African kingdoms which flourished between 300 A.D and 1600
A.D. In Kente Nwen Toma (Kente Woven Cloth)
we are the observer and also the observed caught in the process
of observation. Jonathan Crary points out in his seminal text,
"Techniques of the Observer", that stereographic viewing
of a particular location can create an immediate apparent tangibility
and even the sense of déjà vu when later experiencing
the physical place itself.(3) In Kente Nwen Toma we have
a visual and also a spatial beginning of what may be in store
when we do touch base in Ghana.
Born in Malaysia, Anuar Ayob came to the United States
two years ago to further his study in Electronic Arts at RPI.
His work deals with issues of the social and cultural identity
of the Malay people. Being a foreigner in the U.S., and faced
with different cultures, issues, perceptions, and complications,
Ayob has produced videos, installations, and works created for
the internet that relate to his homeland. In PRESERVING MALAY,
a 10 minute single channel video created in 2002, Ayob portrays
the lifestyles of a family from Malaysia, who has been living
in Troy, New York for the past 8 years. The video is about parents
who are trying to enlighten and maintain the identity of their
children by teaching them the culture, language, and the lifestyles
of the Malay people and Islamic practice. This experimental documentary
was a collaboration with all the family members, who were not
only the subjects portrayed, but the creators who also recorded
some of the footage.
Tom Bamberger, a photographer, who lives in Milwaukee,
is currently exploring landscape photography as a "meditation
on truth". Here he presents recent work that uses digital
techniques to form repetitive elements from "real" landscape
photographs. He begins by extending the boundaries of the horizon
line to exceed beyond 360 degrees. Using the computer to clone
and erase sections of his landscape photographs, Bamberger extends
the information that comes from the smaller frame of a camera
in an almost biologic process akin to reproductive copying of
DNA. Bamberger describes his method as "processing and choosing
elements that seem more 'natural' or just natural enough to not
seem synthetic." His pieces California Homes and Spring
Trees, suggest both what one feels intuitively to be the patterns
of the synthetic and those of the landscapes of nature. He leaves
us finding solace in repetition and opens us to see profound clarity
within the quotidian.
Meghan Boody exhibits the "imaginary homelands"
residing within the territory of the mind. A New York based artist,
trained as a photographer, Boody creates elaborate surrealistic
and psychologically charged narratives of young girls' metamorphosis
into adolescence. She photographs models and friends who are costumed
and posed as symbolic figures for her final compositions, which
are composed within the computer and then digitally printed. Psyche
and Smut is an ongoing series of large prints arranged like
pages from a book which tell the tale of a "proper, well-bred"
young girl's journey into the darkly erotic side of her own self,
the struggle for supremacy between the "good twin" and
the "evil twin" (id versus ego), and the eventual transformations
that both selves undergo in the process of incorporating into
one singular soul."(4) Boody's allegory of the acculturation
of girls into the often-restrictive roles that societies ascribe
for them transforms photography from what is traditionally an
instrument of verification to one that rearranges histories and
clears the view to reveal simultaneity of events whose origins
lie in the use of photomontage within the art movements of Dada
and Surrealism.
Born in Barcelona, Spain and raised in Spain, Germany, Canada,
Japan, and America, Sigrid Hackenberg has, almost by necessity,
created "imaginary homelands" through her work in video
and installation. Her two-channel video projection installation,
The Time and the Place was recorded in the Extremadura area
of Spain, an arid, harsh landscape dominated by groves of olive
trees. The landscape is elongated to over 80 inches, transformed
metaphorically by the stretch of memory. Recollection of a place
of contemplation, so limited in the rush of the contemporary world,
is there and intact, held by the simplicity of nature and the
human traces remembered and recorded, yet it is distant and pieced
together. Hackenberg's work is an observation of the moments of
everyday life; the time and place now preserved personifying her
belief that "a spiritual presence in nature, sound, objects,
people, and places exists."
Rachelle Menshikova, a Russian born Israeli, presents
As It Happens, a 20 minute video consisting of a collection
of personal narratives by young Israeli women who talk about their
lives at particular moments: first during the negotiations at
Camp David in the summer of 2000 and again in 2002, as the ongoing
current war/struggle in Israel becomes almost consuming. As
It Happens gives a voice to women situated in their home environments
and gives the private voice exposure in public. Rachelle states,
"I believe, we all (artists in particular) function bringing
a witness to this world. One tends to expect certain integrity
from a witness, at least integrity in a sense of honesty and sincerity.
The accent on the witness from this perspective was one of the
goals taken in this work. Even though the work has no claim to
be an historical document, I still feel the importance of sticking
to the truths living in my friends' (the interviewed women) feelings
and emotions."
She further states, "This conflict, locked in the condition
of 'no exit', teaches us among other things to stop asking the
popular question 'how is it going to end?' This very desire for
resolution, being a part of human nature, when taken to the extremes,
fuels the fires of aggression and violence. Through exposing the
emotional experiences of people's voices in this work I hope to
offer a chance to the Western cultured audience to realize that
they are not watching and involving themselves in a Western movie
which has a stable continuation on TV screens daily, but rather
witnessing a tragedy of two nations. The women talking throughout
As It Happens are mothers and their connections between
the past and the future as well as between the fantasy and the
fear are particularly distinctive due to their maternal instincts,
which function as driving forces for each of their child's survival
from the beginning of the pregnancy. I believe that creating a
portrait based on witnessing emotional subjective experience allows
us to rethink the values for realness, making an addition to the
political circumstances." Rachellle's powerful narrative
presents the complexities of survival in extremely difficult circumstances
and gives us hope that life continues even as one faces conflicts
which threaten states, regions, or territories.
Guto Nóbrega was born in Brazil in 1965 and is
a professor at the School of Fine Arts in the Universidade Federal
do Rio de Janeiro. His interests center around interactivity and
interface as a way to think about and construct new realities
with the help of digital technologies. Nobrega asks us to consider
that the digital body is converging as a hybrid with our physical
body and space. Cache Memory is a work about time and memory.
His childhood photographs were used as reference and inspiration
for the contemporary re-photographing of those exact places, although
he is no longer there posed as a child. Memory is recovered by
the photos and the memory of the computer that allows interaction
with the digital image on the screen. Cache Memory shows
that the past, the present, and the future can become one by a
mere click of the finger.
Lazarina Todorova was born in 1977 in the town of Plovdiv,
Bulgaria. Todorova's video and installation work aspire to articulate
the complexity and relevance of issues of migration, mobility,
assimilation, cultural identification and alienation, the re-discovery
of "roots" and origins, the longing for belonging, and
the hybridity of the self. Her recent creative endeavors reflect
"a deeply personal engagement with the themes of transnational
experience and displacement." Her work, Untitled,
2001 is an 11 minute single-channel video and is an autobiographical
work, communicating a desire to re-invent the idea of home, both
as a tangible experience situated in the physicality of geography
and as a dislocated presence/absence that inhabits the realm of
the imaginary. Two parallel worlds (one of fast-paced, media-saturated
dynamism and the other of seemingly reassuring permanence and
simplicity) are represented through the two interweaving portraits
of the artist and her grandmother. Shifting between modes of dissonance
and synchronicity, their relationship grows to transcend the reductive
binaries of culture, tradition, and individualism and affirms
a deep spiritual connection of both cultural transmission and
transformation. Shards of memory acquire greater status and greater
resonance as trivial things become symbols for not only the subjects
in the video, but also for us, the viewer.
Elyn Zimmerman is a New York based artist, born in Philadelphia,
PA, who works in a variety of media including stone, photography,
and digital media. Her photographs of archaic structures and ruins
worldwide serve as a personal library of images that inform and
stimulate her work as a sculptor of large scale stone works, often
for Public Art commissions. Her work conveys a strong longing
for permanence in a fleeting world. The Iris digital ink jet prints
in the MAGNA GRÆCIA series are, in the artists words,
"very traditional images, but framed with a modern 'eye'.
They refer to the long tradition of 19th Century travel photography
and its fine-grained verisimilitude, but have been freely altered
in large and small ways with the magic of Photoshop." Zimmerman
makes a compelling study of the mutable imagescape of the ancient
remains of the once flourishing Greek seaport colonies of southern
Italy and Sicily.(5)
Digital media reflect and even conserve our transience as human
beings who have a finite time and place in the world. Its portability
and flexibility help to preserve, bridge and express aspects of
our physical or mental alienation from our place of birth or temporal
remembrances.
…the photograph tells me to invert … it reminds
me that it's my present that is foreign, and that the past is
home, albeit a lost home in a lost city in the mists of lost time….
being claimed, or informed that the facts of my faraway life were
illusions, and that this continuity was the reality. (6)
Color, texture, sound, and movement flavor the composition of
location. They echo the grandness that once was, or still is,
whether from within ones' cultural practice or from without. The
artists' in the Imaginary Homelands exhibition recollect
the landscape, reflecting elements of the everyday which become
monumental in their reconstituted state. Conserved in the digital
realm, their "imaginary homelands" live and breathe
and impart to others a sense of who we are and what is held to
be important.
Kathleen Ruiz, 2002
________________
1. Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism
1981-1991, New York, Penguin Books, 1991, pgs. 10 & 12.
2. Lyotard, Jean-Francois., The Inhuman: Reflections on Time
Fr. 1988, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991, pgs. 11-15.
3. Crary, Jonathan.Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and
Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Mass.: MIT Press, Cambridge,
1990, pgs.123-124.
4. Korotkin, Joyce, "The New York Art World", October
2000.
5. Lunenfeld, Peter. Snap to Grid: A User's Guide to Digital
Arts, Media, and Cultures, Boston, The MIT Press, 2000, pg.
69.
6. Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism
1981-1991, New York, Penguin Books, 1991, pg. 9.
Kathleen Ruiz is a digital media artist, curator, and Assistant
Professor of Electronic Arts at
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY.
.
Special thanks to John Kolb, Sharon Roy, Marc Miller and Patrick
Valiquette at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute for the loan of
laptop computers. Also a special thanks to Sigrid Hackenberg who
is the inspiration for the title of the exhibition and to Frances
Gray for her encouragement. Additionally a huge thanks to Ariel,
Kate, Larry, Colleen, Kathleen and all the CPW board and staff
for enabling this exhibition to occur.
Imaginary
Homelands:
Reconstituted Narratives in Digital Landscape
curated by Kathleen Ruiz
November 2 to Dec. 22, 2002
The Center
of Photography
59 Tinker Street, Woodstock N.Y. 12498
t. 845.679.9957 f. 845.679.6337
info@cpw.org / www.cpw.org
Gallery hours are Wednesday to Sunday Noon – 5 pm
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