Press release, (excerpt)
For this exhibition the artist is presenting
his latest video work entitled Homeland Security, 2003, and a selection
of his long term work with intellectuals entitled Seminars/Lectures.
Seminars/Lectures is an ongoing project
and an attempt of a representation of intellectuals within
their working environment. Since 1995, he has been visiting class rooms
and public lectures of his interest in which he took photographs from
the subjective position of a participant. These photographs are giving
an observation of a field, namely critical cultural education, that is
important for the productive reproduction of society. Education and knowledge
are sites of contest and conflict as well as they mirror tensions and
fractions in society and politics, something that becomes also evident
with the selection of these lectures and seminars:
Sande Cohen, Historiography, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia,
11/22/1995; Griselda Pollock, Killing Men / Dying Women: Myth, Gesture
and Sexual Difference in the 1950s, colloquium "fémininmasculin",
Les Revues Parlées, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris 2/2/1996; Zeinab
Eyega, Female Circumcision , Female Genital Mutilation, A Health &
Human Rights Issue for Girls and Women, Columbia University, New York
2/25/1997; Stuart Hall, Ethnicity, nation and race at the millennium,
The Institute of Education, University of London, London, 7/1/1999; Jan
Philipp Reemtsma, Aryeh Neier, Robert Rindler, Gilles Peress, Judith Friedlander,
Documenting Genocide: Defining War Crimes, International Symposium on
Military War Crimes: History and Memory, New School University, New York,
12/3/1999; Julia Bryan-Wilson, A Monument of Nuclear Warning, Places of
Memory: Part 1, College Art Association, Hilton Hotel, New York, 2/24/2000;
3 photographs Pierre Bourdieu, Recherches récentes, Collège
de France, Paris, 1/12/2000; Etienne Balibar, Outlines of a topography
of cruelty, Columbia University, New York, 4/11/2000; Fredric Jameson,
Modernity, Modernism and Late Modernism, UCLA, Los Angeles, 4/26/01; Rosalind
Krauss, Bruce Nauman, Dia Art Foundation, New York, 5/23/2002; Daniel
Barenboim, Edward Said, Music and Society, moderator, Michael Kimmelman,
The New School, New York, 10/1/2002 and Klaus Theweleit, Playstation Cordoba/Yugoslavia/Afghanistan
etc.- A war model, Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert Gallery, New York,
10/9/2002
Homeland Security I V, 2003, are short video segments that show
the artist utter particular sentences in all the 11 languages he has been
studying so far as part of his never-ending art practice that consists
of learning foreign languages. The repetition of the same sentence across
the register of different languages including Arabic, his latest
long term commitment next to Chinese - is questioning the very meaning
of these sentences. This work makes reference to the newly created US
department of Homeland Security, that is resembling some kind of a quasi-totalitarian
big brother police administration as an answer to terrorism. The sentences
are simple and express a degree of paranoia: "I am not a terrorist"
(1), "I am not a religious fanatic" (2), "I don't give
money to terrorist networks" (3), "I don't know how to build
bombs" (4), and "I am not downloading dangerous information
from the Internet".
work list
Ganahl Maisonneuve, February 5, Paris,
2003Seminars/Lectures:
S/L: Sande Cohen, Historiography, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia,
11/22/1995
2 photographs
S/L: Griselda Pollock, Killing Men / Dying Women: Myth, Gesture and Sexual
Difference in the 1950s, colloquium "fémininmasculin",
Les Revues Parlées, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris 2/2/1996
3 photographs
S/L: Zeinab Eyega, Female Circumcision , Female Genital Mutilation, A
Health & Human Rights Issue for Girls and Women, Columbia University,
New York 2/25/1997
4 photographs
S/L: Stuart Hall, Ethnicity, nation and race at the millennium, The Institute
of Education, University of London, London, 7/1/1999
3 photographs
S/L: Jan Philipp Reemtsma, Aryeh Neier, Robert Rindler, Gilles Peress,
Judith Friedlander, Documenting Genocide: Defining War Crimes, International
Symposium on Military War Crimes: History and Memory, New School University,
New York, 12/3/1999
2 photographs
S/L: Pierre Bourdieu, Recherches récentes, Collège de France,
Paris, 1/12/2000
4 photographs
S/L: Julia Bryan-Wilson, A Monument of Nuclear Warning, Places of Memory:
Part 1, College Art Association, Hilton Hotel, New York, 2/24/2000
3 photographs
S/L: Etienne Balibar, Outlines of a topography of cruelty, Columbia University,
New York, 4/11/2000
2 photographs
S/L: Fredric Jameson, Modernity, Modernism and Late Modernism, UCLA, Los
Angeles, 4/26/01
2 photographs
S/L: Rosalind Krauss, Bruce Nauman, Dia Art Foundation, New York, 5/23/2002
4 photographs
S/L: Daniel Barenboim, Edward Said, Music
and Society, moderator, Michael Kimmelman, The New School, New York, 10/1/2002
2 photographs
S/L: Klaus Theweleit, Playstation Cordoba/Yugoslavia/Afghanistan
etc.- A war model, Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert Gallery, New York,
10/9/2002
2 photographs
Homeland Security, I, video 2003, approx. 2 min
Homeland Security, II, video 2003, approx. 2 min
Homeland Security, III, video 2003, approx. 2 min
Homeland Security, IV, video 2003, approx. 2 min
Homeland Security, V, video 2003, approx. 2 min
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