My single visit to Border Cultures: Part Two (work, labour), curated by Srimoyee Mitra at the Art Gallery of Windsor, was definitely not enough to get a larger sense of this sprawling group exhibition. Including international and local artists, Border Cultures, contextualized within political, socio-economic, and geographic Windsor-Detroit stories of/on borders, is a multi-year series of exhibitions which began with Part One (homes, land) in 2013, followed by Part Two (work, labour) at present, and in 2015, will culminate in Part Three (about security and surveillance). Part Two (work labour) examines the life/work spaces of visible and invisible labour in a broad spectrum of border regions. My visit coincided with an in-gallery conversation with participating artist Phillip Hoffman, as well as Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran from C.A.M.P., as one of the last of a three-month-long series of live events accompanying the exhibition. As such, my short visit tended to focus on two larger projects within the exhibition, namely The Boat Modes and Dialogic Illuminations of Marian McMahon.
C.A.M.P., The Boat Modes
C.A.M.P., both a physical space in Mumbai and a "way of working that is open and collaborative" rather than an artist collective, is concerned with "how technical experimentation and artistic form can meet" when tracing global phenomena such as the personal stories/states of workers via digital media. C.A.M.P.'s project The Boat Modes includes several years of exchange between C.A.M.P. and sailors traveling from India to Sharjah (UAE), Iran, and Somalia. The goods they routinely carry, listed in a "litany of trade and goods", are exhibited in mobile cruciform collections of photographs and manifests. Traveling by the "monstrous forms" of dhow sailboats, sailors pass back and forth through "a more fluid landscape" of habitual narratives and routines of the region (such as the simultaneous histories of piracy and smuggling with the nostalgia of ship-building as a craft) by recording their experiences on their cameras and phones, often accompanied with favorite music. C.A.M.P. has collected these fragments into a 79-minute film, From Gulf To Gulf To Gulf, which follows the sailors' experiences through the material logic of goods being handled and loaded, interlaced with a temporal logic of youth to maturity, the calms and extremes of weather, and the slow length of several days at sea. The sailors' footage shown as a durational film is meant as a "form of resistance" against accessing these stories only as "distraction" through forms such as the internet. To Anand and Sukumaran, the film isn't mere exposé but a "making explicit" of the "representational dilemmas" between how the film functions for the sailors and how it functions universally.
The large installation of archival material in Dialogic Illuminations of Marian McMahon includes material from the late artist's life and work from the 1950s to the 1990s while living on the border of Windsor-Detroit. These "dialogic illuminations" include footage, documents, drawings, and photographs surrounding her biography and larger film practice. Spanning broader histories of Windsor-Detroit's role in the Underground Railroad as well as issues of war and state via McMahon's family, the installation focuses upon the specific effects these histories had upon McMahon growing up, and the resulting ways in which she told and re-told these stories through her work. Often merging the past with the present, McMahon used footage and photographs to talk about more personal experiences. In two collections of small photographs – one from a 1990 trip to Egypt to visit Queen Hatshepsut's Temple, and another of the mouth of a mysterious cave in Spain – are accompanied by McMahon's account of her search for their "possible meanings" years later, relating this need to return as "the start of an inner process." The photographs in themselves are hard to place in time, as they seem to occupy both real and fictive realities; in one, McMahon's form in half-shadow can only be made out by the glow of a Technicolor-red bow straight out of a Michael Powell film. Her collection of historical and personal footage has been made into 55-minute film by her former partner Philip Hoffman, the completion of which is a way for both he and McMahon to continue to "tell stories from where we stand from what has informed us." McMahon's collection of footage can also be viewed via Korsakow software, a format meant to allows visitors to navigate film fragments in a more organic way, but which comes across as somewhat prescribed because of a rather fixed looping structure.
The projects of C.A.M.P. and Philip Hoffman with Marian McMahon are only a small percentage of Border Cultures' wide-ranging perspectives on labour and agency through and alongside personal and material/technological accounts, wherein the suggestion is that new paths are formed where past and present meet. Many participating artists place considerable emphasis on the space of access and encounter, and alongside film screenings, audio recordings, wall texts, slide collections, and QR codes are just a few of the multi-layered formats involved. Spending more than one visit before the closing of the exhibition is highly recommended.
Art Gallery of Windsor: http://www.agw.ca/exhibitions/current/391
Border Cultures: Part Two (work, labour) continues until April 13.
Kim Neudorf is an artist and writer currently living in London, Ontario. Her paintings have shown widely in Alberta, and she exhibited in The Room And Its Inhabitants at Susan Hobbs Gallery, organized by Patrick Howlett. She has contributed writing most recently to Susan Hobbs Gallery, Cooper Cole Gallery, Forest City Gallery, and Evans Contemporary Gallery. She is Akimbo's London correspondent and can be followed @KimNeudorf on Twitter.
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Border Cultures at the Art Gallery of Windsor
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