Wild Seeds in America by Yael Bartana
dal 18/10/2008 al 18/10/2008
Segnalato da
18/10/2008
Wild Seeds in America by Yael Bartana
Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries C. Johnson Design Center, New York
Performance with 15 students, sound equipment, and mats. Part of "Ours: Democracy in the Age of Branding"
Performance with 15 students, sound equipment, and mats. New work, commissioned by Parsons for "Ours: Democracy in the Age of Branding". In the first Wild Seeds, Yael Bartana filmed a group of 18-year-old Israeli pacifists playing a game called the "Evacuation of Gilad's Colony," based on Israel's forced removal of Jewish settlers from the Occupied Territories. Against a breathtaking rural backdrop, the participants tried to resist and break away from two of their own teammates who had volunteered to act as "authorities." The game's serious subtext became more explicit as the players' language mimicked the actual words used by the evacuated settlers. In Wild Seeds in America, the game is repeated, but this time as a commissioned performance against the urban backdrop of New York City, with New School students who will learn the original context of the game in progressive stages. The experiment looks at how one society's rituals and behaviors of dissent are received outside of their original social context, and how knowledge shapes that experience. In a broader context, it is a portrait of a community that declares its ideology in opposition to the policy of the state.