We Are The World

“One picture is worth a thousand words” is a timeless adage and certainly applicable to this group of young artists from all over the world, using video, film and photography as their mediums.

Lee Mingwei writes a diary on life with a loved one (in this case, a flower called “Lily”) with whom he sleeps, eats, showers, writes, and meditates (“A Hundred Days with Lily,” 1996, photographic series). Timur Celikdag probes and investigates masculinity and personal style of men of his native country (“Istanbul,” 2002, photographic series), while Kimiko Yoshida interprets ancestral customs and breaks them by becoming a modern-day nomad, vagabond, fugitive (“Marry Me,” 2003, DVD and photographic series). Daniel Blaufuks takes us on poetic journeys into the past through old post cards with fictional messages by French writer George Perec (“A Perfect Day,” 2004, DVD and installation). Young protagonists defining their place in forgotten suburbs and lost coastal towns are portrayed by Patricia Piccinini (“Sandman,” 2002, photographic series and film), and Olga Kisseleva explores the identity and self-image of female factory workers in St Petersburg (“Your Self Portrait,” 2002, DVD). Jun Yang investigates the origins and transformations of his own name in the linguistic gap between Mandarin and English (“Jun Yang and Soldier Woods,” 2003, DVD).

Fiorenza Menini investigates young people’s behavior in extreme situations (“Resistance Forever,” 2002, DVD) and their dreams and hopes (“Perfect Life,” 2003, series of small photography), whereas Alessandra Sanguinetti depicts two young cousins on the verge of entering adolescence, staging playful renditions of “Ophelia,” “Othello” and other dramatized situations of life and death (from “The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams,” 1998-2002, photographic series). Jonathan Calm juxtaposes on a screen, divided like a diptych, two people's lives headed in diametrically different directions from suburban to urban surroundings (“Delta,” 2004, DVD). Oksun Kim captures in her portraits the estrangement yet also strong connection between couples with different cultural origin (“Happy Together,” 2002, photographic series). Mladen Bizumic shows a computer animated representation of a conservation island’s geographical shift from the Hauraki Gulf to the harbor of Venice. Art, technology and architecture from different parts of the world meet in this project (“Hauturu,” 2003, DVD). Mika Rottenberg sees the world upside down through the eyes of an acrobat walking on her hands on ice, a playful yet dangerous balancing act (“Julie,” 2003, DVD). Ingrid Mwangi is seen wearing various masks made out of her own hair that has been draped, styled and braided over her face (“Neger - Don’t Call Me,” 2000, video and sound installation). Jemima Stehli plays on “The Critic Sees”(Jasper Johns, 1964) by exposing herself in a studio striptease to the male gaze of critics, dealers, writers and curators (“Strip,” 2000, photographic series).

The fascinating link between the young artists in “We Are the World” is that they all have multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multi-national backgrounds, and none of them live more than a small part of the time in their native countries. Each of them tries to deal with past and present by telling stories (realistic and/or fictional) that reveal their anxieties, hopes, cultural heritage, coming to terms with social and political tensions, and last but not least their dealing with being the first true generation of “global kids.”

— Elga Wimmer

Pressetext

We Are The World
Kurator: Elga Wimmer

mit Mladen Bizumic, Daniel Blaufuks, Jonathan Calm, Timur Celikdag, Oksun Kim, Olga Kisseleva, Fiorenza Menini, Lee Mingwei, Ingrid Mwangi, Patricia Piccinini, Mika Rottenberg, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Jemima Stehli, Jun Yang, Kimiko Yoshida