“I am like one who wore his brick to show the world how was his home.”
Bertolt Brecht
Often I was asked this question: how do I see myself as an artist? My answer has always been the same: I consider myself an immigrant worker. My job is to consider what it is to be an artist, when he feels different from in his own cultural context, even in his own role.
With this necessity, this permanent need to think of exile, the project of the Exile Pavilion was born, as a traveling project, offering a parallel cartography, a free geography of temporary exhibitions, with stops in different countries.
The project raises the question of the exile as a new space to be reinvented, to be rethought and finally to be invested. He wants to question both the global and specific links between various forms of displacement, whether the migrant worker’s situation, the expatriate, the refugee or the exile of war, natural disasters, economical problems, and political or racial persecutions.The Exile Pavilion wants to invest and cross all boundaries, revisiting the experiences of the exile and reactivate the traces in history. Where does the exile begin and where does it end?
Are we all equal against the displacement and exile? And from who are we exiles?The Exile Pavilion does not exist as an architectural building even if the proposal is made for architects to imagine. But it is the works of artists, visual artists, musicians, poets, writers, performers they are exiles or their work deals with the displacement, which build together this protean and nomadic pavilion. Its journey will make layovers at artistic structures, institutions, ephemeral places, in the form of exhibitions, publications and meetings. At each stop, the works and archival materials are redesigned according to the place and its history.
mounir fatmi,
June 30, 2016
Project
mounir fatmi
http://www.mounirfatmi.com/
fatmi.mounir@studiofatmi.com
Project Assistant
Laura Pandolfo
laura@studiofatmi.com
Associate curators
Marie Deparis-Yafil
mdeparisyafil@gmail.com
Mostafa Aghrib
mostafa.aghrib@gmail.com
Brahim Alaoui
alaoui.artmus@gmail.com
Ariel Kyrou
ariel.kyrou@gmail.com
Website design
Untitled Design Agency
Courtesy: the artist and Officine dell’Immagine.
The photographs from the Stateless series show scenes of departure and exile fluctuating between the absurd and the dramatic, which instantly create a compassionate relation to their protagonists. There is a particular atmosphere in these images, emanating from the encounter of the situation exhibited and the context in which it takes place, written like an “enigmatic tale” with roots in the artist’ own experience. Indeed, they contain a very autobiographical element: the artist grew up during the Iran-Iraq war, and his family was forced to move from Southern Iran to the North, a forced departure and a childhood in times of war that an entire generation, that of Gohar Dashti, can never for- get. This series, of which two photographs are presented here, was created in Qeshm, an Iranian island in the Persian Gulf that possesses a particularly impressive landscape of rocks and canyons, a landscape that reinforces the work’s symbolic and dramaturgical character, highlighting the way the body of the refugee is projected in the midst of an arid and exogenous environment.
Born 1980 in Ahvaz, Iran, Gohar Dashti lives and works in Tehran. Gohar Dashti received her M.A. in photography from the Art University of Tehran in 2005. For the past 15 years she has been making large scale photography with a particular focus on social issues. Her work references history and contemporary culture, as well as the convergence of anthropological and sociological perspectives; employing a unique, quasi-theatrical aesthetic, she brings to bear a diverse intellectual and cultural experience to illuminate and elaborate upon her perception of the world around her. In her most recent works, Dashti has explored, through her highly stylized, densely poetic observations of human and plant-life, the innate kinship between the natural world and human migrations. Fascinated with human-geographical narratives and their interconnection to her own personal experiences, Gohar Dashti believes that nature is what connects her to the multiple meanings of ‘home’ and ‘displacement’, both as conceptual abstractions, and as concrete realities that delineate and contour our existence. The result is a series of quirky landscapes and portraits, as lush as they are arch, inciting questions about the immense, variegated, border-eschewing reach of nature – immune to cultural and political divisions – and the ways in which immigrants inevitably search out and reconstruct familiar topographies in a new, ostensibly foreign land.
Courtesy: the artist and Officine dell’Immagine.