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5/11/2004

Three exibitions

Witte de With, Rotterdam

TIME SUSPENDED [Uitgestelde Tijd]
A project by Herman Asselberghs, Els Opsomer, Pieter Van Bogaert, in collaboration with Ann Clicteur

November 7, 2004 – January 9, 2005
Opening: November 6, 5 p.m.

In November 2002, three artists and critics from Brussels journeyed to Palestine for a ten-day visit. The knowledge they possessed about the unresolved conflict between Israel and Palestine was about as much as any westerner who watches news on TV and reads newspapers. On arrival though, they witnessed first-hand the complexities of daily life in the region, a reality that does not fit into slick media sound bites. Two years on, they have published a book on that journey, with photos and texts: TIME SUSPENDED. The time they needed to comprehend the situation was long, particularly at a time when images and reports on the conflict zones across the globe compete on an almost daily basis.

The trio have put together an exhibition for WORK IN TRANSIT, using the same title. New individual works engage in a dialogue with works created in the last few decades of the twentieth century. The clash between the past and the present enables the clarification of a personal perspective from engaged outsiders. The distance between here and yonder seems to be constantly shifting, what seems far away becomes a close-up and vice versa. The works on show diametrically oppose the familiar media hype and sketch the 'timeless' nature of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

To date, in 2004, everything but nothing seems to have changed in the ongoing crisis. 1948, 1967, 1987, 1993, 2000: a never-ending parade of historic moments with devastating consequences for Israeli and Palestinian citizens. The images from the past are the images of today. Military prowess, armed resistance, check points, road blocks, houses destroyed, bloody murderous attacks, fatherless sons, motherless daughters, Sharon and Arafat. They may be the same images but they hit harder, are more harrowing and heinous.

Pressure is rising and at the same time everyone is on hold in the waiting game. Waiting for a passport; waiting at the border; waiting in the transit zone; waiting at the check point; waiting for the next curfew. Waiting for the next attack. For the next reprisal. The reprisal in return for the reprisal. Waiting for a political solution to resolve this side, the other side, no side, all sides. And finally, waiting for it all to pass. As if time were suspended.

Exhibition design: Ann Clicteur

Catalogue:
TIME SUSPENDED [Uitgestelde Tijd]
Concept: Herman Asselberghs, Els Opsomer, Pieter Van Bogaert
Photos: Els Opsomer
Text: Herman Asselberghs, Pieter Van Bogaert
English/Dutch, colour/black-and-white, 256 pages, 25 euro
ISBN 90 8088 391 3

Image: Surda Checkpoint between Ramallah and Bir Zeit, November 27, 2002
[from the series Erased/Vanished by Els Opsomer]

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TRANSIT
A project by Taysir Batniji
November 7, 2004 – January 9, 2005
Opening: November 6, 5 p.m.

For the last few years, most especially since the second Intifada broke out in 2001, the Rafah border has been the only way for people from the Gaza Strip to leave or enter the region. People travel via Cairo airport, men traveling alone separated from the other travelers, and under heightened Egyptian guard. All the travelers encounter each other in an open-air transit zone in Rafah, waiting for the moment when the Israelis will permit them transit to Gaza. This wait can last from a day to several weeks.

Even though it is forbidden to take photos in the transit zones between Egypt and Gaza, Taysir Batniji secretly photographed his journey to the Gaza Strip in 2004. The work Transit presents these images and reflects on the extremely difficult conditions under which Palestinians must travel.

Taysir Batniji was born in Gaza, Palestine, in 1966. He studied fine arts at the An-Najah National University in Nablus (Palestine), continuing his studies in France, at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Bourges (1995-1997), at the Université Paris 8, Saint-Denis (2000), and at the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Marseille (2002-2003). In 2001-2002 he did a residency at Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart for six months, in 2003 he spent a month at Joal-Fadiouth in Senegal, and in 2003 and 2004 he worked at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris.
He has staged exhibitions at various venues in Europe and beyond. He held a solo presentation in Centre Culturel Français, Gaza (Palestine) in 2004, and in 2002 he exhibited among others in Belgrade, in Berlin (K&S Gallery), and in Paris ( La Galerie). His work was also presented at the Havana Biennial and the Venice Biennale in 2003.

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OUT OF THE SHADOWS
WHAT IS WRITTEN CANNOT BE UNWRITTEN
A project by Peter Friedl
November 7, 2004 – January 9, 2005
Opening Saturday November 6, 2004, 5 p.m.

OUT OF THE SHADOWS
The EU border has run through Cyprus for half a year now. What was a cease-fire line monitored by UN peace-keeping troops—a negative fairy-tale scenario that could not be changed—has mutated to the EU border after the more prosperous South entered unilaterally into the European Union. And what is commonly referred to as the “Cyprus Problem”—the founding and destruction of the first undivided republic (1960–1974) and the ethnically defined, de-facto division of the Mediterranean island, which is positioned ambiguously between three continents, into a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot part—has thereby experienced a further development. The “State of Exception” (Giorgio Agamben), which has today reached its greatest global distribution and normal status as a side-effect and remnant of modernity, also determines Cyprus’ inner borders and socio-historical identity. It defines the forms of rule and reaction. As a dramatic model with pictorial qualities, it presents itself for the aesthetic investigation of conflicts that would otherwise remain at the margins of narratives or somewhere in between, and become buried in the media’s speechlessness.

OUT OF THE SHADOWS is based on the idea that the exhibition is the media. “Cyprus” is a projection screen—an object of desire for all types of geopolitical interests in the course of a mutating history equipped with all ingredients necessary for an epic tale (anti-colonial struggle, civil war, partition, modernization, and offshore business).

The exhibition material comes in part from public workshops held in Rotterdam. Various authors have been invited to write short, informative contributions based on a fragmentary list of themes, such as would be necessary for a hitherto non-existent dictionary of the history of Cyprus—which would thus be a critical history. The perished world of the Greek and Turkish shadow theater is the arena for dualistic obsessions. The slide series Playgrounds (Cyprus) documents “from below” the state of affairs after decades of social amnesia.

Otto Preminger’s Hollywood saga Exodus, a belated film on the founding of a state (Israel), was produced at the same time as Cyprus gained independence. The story begins in the British colony of Cyprus shortly after World War II and recalls the illegal Jewish immigrants to Palestine interned in detention camps located there. In Pier Paolo Pasolini’s short film Che cosa sono le nuvole? (1967), the Cypriot story of Othello is radically and melancholically rescued from the oblivion of bourgeois tragedy. After a revolutionary dismantling of the intrigue, it is tossed onto the garbage heap as perfectly happy trash.

The topography of division and displacement delivers the open structure for an exhibition project about the construction of history and concepts based on the example of Cyprus.
Peter Friedl

Witte de With, center for contemporary art, Witte de Withstraat 50, 3012 BR, Rotterdam

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