Opening, Decemer 6, 2012, 6.30 pm
Exhibition, December 7 – February 8, 2013
The Iranian artist Ghazel has been focusing since the 1990s on issues of migration, exile and (trans)cultural identities. Among the Paris- and Tehran-based artist’s most well-known works are the “Me Series” of very short videos in which Ghazel, dressed in a chador, performs absurd yet tragicomic scenes from transcultural everyday life; her poster campaign “Wanted” about attempted marriages between illegal aliens and legal residents living in France as survival tactic; and the film “Home(stories),” which she shot with asylum seekers in Italy based on a theatrical production about the problem of finding a home. Inspired by her own experiences with immigration, discrimination, threats of expulsion, and finally the achievement of a new nationality, Ghazel has recently turned her attention to stories others have to tell, often refugees and transit migrants without papers. In her video “Road Movie,” for example, young Afghan and Iranian immigrants she encountered in her Paris neighborhood (on their way to the UK or northern Europe) and whom she helped survive in the city and deal with the bureaucracy, become the catalysts for a performance on life in the liminal zone of transit, a video in which Ghazel portrays these people without showing them.
Ghazel (b. 1966 in Iran) lives in Teheran and Paris.
www.ghazel.me
Curated by Christian Kravagna and Hedwig Saxenhuber.