ruth ewan (damnatio memoriae)

Damnatio Memoriae

installation, slide projection, audio, archival material, 2010

DAMNATIO MEMORIAE (the damnation of memory), refers to a punishment issued by the Roman Senate following a person’s death in an attempt to remove the person in question from cultural memory. Items such as coins, statues, paintings and documents were thought to be destroyed, names erased and property seized. Shown at Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung in Hohenlockstedt, Germany, Damnatio Memoriae was made up of a series of interconnected installations, mapping relations between seemingly disparate historic events.

A crop of Russian-Siberian heritage tomatoes, named after American actor and singer Paul Robeson (1898—1976), made up the installation, Them that plants them is soon forgotten. As the tomatoes ripened they were incorporated into the café menu at the Arthur Boskamp Foundation. Included in the installation was archive material relating to Robeson’s political activism and surveillance by both US and UK governments.

A slideshow with narration, The Brank, functioned as a loop of connecting information and backdrop to the works, making links between a scold’s bridle,damnatio memoriae, a missing sculpture of Paul Robeson by artist Antonio Salemme, MK ULTRA, Paul Robeson’s activism, anarchism, Ralph Chaplin, black cats, the European witch-hunts and an obsolete law of England and Wales known as the Common Scold Act.

Other works in the exhibition included a collection of inner record sleeves from Paul Robeson albums, The New Idealism, a giant witch’s hat, a collection of overturned images of witches and Black Cat Cross my Path, I Think Every Day’s Gonna Be My Last, where a local black cat was befriended and fed by gallery staff.

website

Regen, Joris Ivens 1929

Akram Zaatari, The Uneasy Subject / MUAC Mexico

The Uneasy Subject / MUAC Mexico from akram zaatari on Vimeo.

walid raad, lecture, Beirut 2005

Simon Critchley: 'There's no justice without terror' - video

Lines of Control

More than forty works of video, prints, photographs, paintings, sculpture, and installation by international artists delve into the past and explore the present to expose the seductive simplicity of drawing lines as a substitute for learning how to live with each other. Living within and across these lines can be a messy, bloody business but also offers a productive space where new nations, identities, languages, and relationships are forged.

At its core, Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space investigates the historic upheaval of the 1947 partition of India that spawned the nations of Pakistan and later Bangladesh. The exhibition is part of an ongoing project initiated in 2005 by Green Cardamom, a London-based nonprofit arts organization. Expanding on the significance of partition in South Asia, Lines of Control at the Johnson Museum also addresses physical and psychological borders, trauma, and the reconfiguration of memory in other partitioned areas: North and South Korea, Sudan and South Sudan, Israel and Palestine, Ireland and Northern Ireland, Armenia and its diaspora, and questions of indigenous sovereignty in the United States. The exhibition explores the products and remainders of partition and borders characteristic of the modern nation-state, and includes the continued impact of colonization, the physical and psychic violence of displacement, dilemmas of identity and belonging, and questions of commemoration.

Artists represented in the exhibition are Bani Abidi, Francis Alÿs, Sarnath Banerjee, Farida Batool, Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Muhanned Cader, Duncan Campbell, Iftikhar Dadi, DAAR, Anita Dube, Taghreed Elsanhouri, Sophie Ernst, Gauri Gill, Shilpa Gupta, Zarina Hashmi, Emily Jacir, Ahsan Jamal, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Amar Kanwar, Noa Lidor, Mario Mabor, Nalini Malani, Naeem Mohaiemen, Tom Molloy, Rashid Rana, Raqs Media Collective, Jolene Rickard, Hrair Sarkissian, Seher Shah, Surekha, Hajra Waheed, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, and Muhammad Zeeshan.

Learned Homeland

1996, installation, public space

A project by Martin Krenn & Oliver Ressler for Neue Galerie, Graz

In Austria, the concept of homeland is implemented not only regionally but also on a supra-regional and state level. This is meant to facilitate and force the citizens’ emotional attachment to the state. This type of manipulation already takes place in the school institution “Learned Homeland”/”Gelernte Heimat” attempts to illustrate these “nativizing strategies” with Austrian school books. The construction of “homeland” is particularly vivid in school books.

In creating collective identities through the concept of homeland, the “own” is always valued against the “other” and in this way demarcated from it. The “own” history is glorified, or even falsified. “Natural beauty” is pulled in for symbolization and concretization of the “Austria homeland” and used to produce a sense of the citizens’ ties to the “homeland.”

Through the early influence of the state school institution on the pupils, equating Austria with homeland is deemed natural. This leads to a situation in which an obviously constructed sense of homeland is seen as a natural fundamental human necessity and is hardly ever questioned.

Poster object at the main square:

Two school book pages expanded with blocks of text and an announcement of the exhibition in the Neue Galerie animated observers to confront the construction of a homeland-concept using their own school experiences. Interviews with passers-by reading the texts on the posters were carried out and recorded on video.

Exhibition in the Neue Galerie:

In the first room of the exhibition, the video documentation of the reactions of those passing by and reading the posters was shown. On display in the next two rooms were twelve Bubblejet prints, which thematized further examples of homeland constitution found in the school textbooks.

Presented in the fourth room was the video “Learned Homeland – Working Talks”/”Gelernte Heimat – Arbeitsgespräche”. This video includes theorists from Austria and Germany who have published texts on racism and homeland.

Interviews were carried out with: Jost Müller, Nora Räthzel, Juliane Rebentisch, Mark Terkessidis, Vera Kockot, Herbert Nikitsch/Bernhard Tschofen and Walter Manoschek.

The conversations expand the content of the theme by pointing out the relationship between homeland and racism in Austria and Germany.