Deleuze’s terminology graphically evokes the way in which elements from the past may disrupt the present signified in an image. A recollection image is an image that exists on the plane of the present but has the power to evoke a plane of the past. If an event is represented as a smooth, consistent plane […]
Films that are produced in contexts that breach the boundaries of nation and question nationalist narratives can be called transnationalist documentaries. They neither describe international trajectories that leave national boundaries intact, nor remain within the levelling and totalizing narratives of multinational capital. Transnational documentary, then, traces the effects of cultural and national intermixing at a […]
The transnational object in Rea Tajiri’s History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige (1991) is a wooden bird her mother carved in the Japanese-American detention camp. It comes to resonate on another historical level when Tajiri finds a photo of the birdcarving class in the National Archives. One day, going through a box of documents […]
A university gallery seemed an unlikely venue for Doug Buis’ show, “Home and Oasis,” which sought to undermine common Western notions of the earth’s existence. However, such a conservative academic milieu served to accent the work’s ironic content. Buis has been addressing ecological issues since the mid-1980s and his most recent work offers fictional accounts […]
In Marta Rodriguez’s Love, Women and Flowers (1989/90) the transnational object is a carnation that travels from Colombian hothouse to KLM jet to European florist. The film takes a highly cultivated flower — it seems to grow right in the refrigerator — and endows it with the haunting histories of women’s labor. The flower’s low […]
Like visual art, contemporary dance is under reformulation in relation to new technologies, challenges to notions of audience and spectacle, and cultural hybridizations. With Karas’ Noiject and the Ballett Frankfurt’s Eidos:Telos, audiences at the Festival international de nouvelle danse this year witnessed large-scale productions which posited an experimental public or social space, circumventing the space […]
“The End(s) of the Museum,” an exhibition and related conference held at Fundacio Tapies in Barcelona last spring, posed questions about whether the museum as we know it in the West could be coming to an end. (1) Alluding to “the end of history,” and taking their cue from Derrida’s Les Fins de l’homme, co-curators […]
It is perhaps through the delicate insertion of the scopophilic vantage point that we can begin to understand Lynn Hershman’s exhibition, “Virtually Yours.” This exhibition, combined video works and the Phantom Limb series of photographs with a recent interactive installation, Room of One’s Own, presenting the artist’s recent development in virtual reality, the Internet, CD-ROM […]
The work exhibited at the first Red Mare exhibition is diverse by design. One of the artists’ primary aims is to show whilst there are common factors that affect women artists, the art women produce is never recognisably ‘female’. Joanna Greenhill’s work makes use of this dialectic between what has traditionally been seen as opposing […]
This significant exhibition constitutes the first one-person exhibition of Kurt Schwitters’ work in Douglas, the Isle of Man, the site of his internment as an ‘enemy alien’ after fleeing from Nazi Germany and Nazi occupied Norway. Curated by Fran Lloyd, Kingston University London, the exhibition marks the 65th anniversary of his death in Kendal and […]