“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.
Today or any day that phone may ring and bring good news.
Ethel Waters
Press
Another 7 days to discover Mounir Fatmi's Pavilion of Exile in Tangier, Tanger Experience, August 8th, 2017.
Stella, Berger, From exile I made glasses to see, Dyptik, n°35, Oct-Nov 2016, pp. 36-38.
Contact
Studio Fatmi Paris Phone and Fax: +33 (0)9 52 78 14 92
mounir fatmi fatmi.mounir@studiofatmi.com
Project Assistant Laura Pandolfo laura@studiofatmi.com
This website was designed by Untitled Duo
Hank Willis Thomas
THE QUESTION BRIDGE
Video project
2012
Courtesy: the artist, Chris Johnson, Bayete Ross, Kamal Sinclair.
Question Bridge: Black Males is an innovative transmedia art project that aims to create a platform to represent and re- define black male identity. His work builds dialogues around stereotypical images of African Americans that the media seek to exploit in advertising, film and television. Thomas and his collaborators traveled across the United States, recording questions from nearly 160 men, bringing the questions to others to answer, and filming additional questions from those respondents that other participants, in turn, could later address. The project enables a large group of men to speak to each other across geographic, economic, political, and generational divisions. The single-channel projection creates the sensation of a virtual conversation, with participants speaking across time and distance, and from their own lived experience. Their voices are key: being heard, not just seen, reaffirms each man’s subjectivity and counteracts dangerous generalizations about group identity. In Thomas’s human-centered art, the elementary call to hear and see one another—to recognize each other as unique yet inter- dependent human beings—is undeniably necessary to over- come racism.
About the artist
Hank Willis Thomas. Born in 1976, Plainfield, NJ. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Hank Willis Thomas is a conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to perspective, identity, commodity, media, and popular culture. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States and abroad including the International Center of Photography, New York; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain; Musée du quai Branly, Paris; Hong Kong Arts Centre, Hong Kong, and the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Netherlands. His collaborative projects include Question Bridge: Black Males, In Search Of The Truth (The Truth Booth), The Writing on the Wall, and For Freedoms. In 2017, For Freedoms was awarded the ICP Infinity Award for New Media and Online Platform.
No items found.
Courtesy: the artist, Chris Johnson, Bayete Ross, Kamal Sinclair.