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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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