![]() between here and there is respectfully designed as a pointed critique of capitalism and the technologies of power. The funerary arrangement (subtitled Homo Sacer, 2011-2015), has been placed back inside the ordinary cardboard shipping box in which they were packaged and sent to the artist. The bones are illuminated and displayed on a satin pillow and encased with glass. The Game of World Domination (2011-2015) is installed in close proximity to the osteological specimen itself. These photographs illustrate the graphic logo RISK®, a work of commercial signage. Her prompting is exemplified by works of photography that depict the collection of human bones cradled in the arms of young men. feldman-kiss asks viewers to consider the precariousness of life in a myriad of ways. We frequently hear about lives lost in conflict and are often given the numbers, as we are in this artwork (subtitled Bread and Circuses, 2015), but these stories, repeated endlessly, become irremediable. ![]() Multi-channel audio composed of world-wide battle related death toll statistics, live RSS feeds reading out incoming news headlines by computerized voices and the artist recital of a heavily redacted UN investigative report describing a first person witness account of a battle aftermath, set the tone for the installation – situating the remains in the context of war-torn regions marred by the legacies of colonialism. ![]() This collision of conflict and body product form the centrepiece of this provocative, multi-sensory kinetic installation. In a continued performative encounter with the market in human materials, the artist proceeded to acquire a complete skeletal set on offer. During the internet meanderings of her research into the masse digital graves of online atrocity photography, feldman-kiss encountered an opportunity to procure human osteological specimens derived from foreign contexts in the Canadian market. The works in witness move from the autobiographical to the overtly political, as observations of violent global conflict and the perpetuation of its political commodification resonate in the video triptych after Africa (2012) and the debut presentation of between here and there (2015).īetween here and there began as a labour of performative research that feldman-kiss undertook following her return from Sudan, where she had participated as United Nations military observer in the generations old east African conflict under the auspices of the Canadian Forces Artists Program (2010-2011) and the United Nations peacekeeping mission. To complicate the aesthetics and interpretations of self-portraiture, feldman-kiss positions her own body/psyche as a political site of resistance. These explorations are presented in witness through four installations that entangle the personal and the political. ![]() This exhibition, in turn, offers a means whereby audiences can come to occupy the gallery space as a site of political engagement and responsibility through the act of witnessing.Ī first generation Canadian of multi-ethnic heritage, whose paternal family fled Nazi persecution to experience a 5 year period of statelessness enroute to safety in the Caribbean, and whose maternal ancestor’s migration to the Caribbean, hundreds of years earlier, was fraught with tragic narratives of colonization, genocide and the transatlantic slave trade, feldman-kiss uses her family histories as a launching point into the investigation of identity, ethics, and geopolitics. feldman-kiss’s work consciously enrols explorations of her identity and artistic process within a series of critical dialogues surrounding the politics and place of art production and consumption. More than simply observing, to witness an action or event is to see, take in, and to act or meditate upon what one has seen. The installations in nichola feldman-kiss’s witness ask us to see. ĭoes “fact” feel brutal only if and when we-either as individuals or as a populace-have grown accustomed to living in a realm of delusion or lies? Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |