Jutta Strohmaier, "Seattle", video installation, 2001, photo: press release
The international exhibition entitled "The Past is a Foreign Country" presents the works of artists that materialize places from memories, animate invented geographies, ask questions concerning their connection to identity and analyze the nature of remembering and forgetting.
The exhibition area is arranged by the Dutch artist Jeroen de Vries, who in this project refers to phrenology – the picturesque scientific theory of the 18th and 19th centuries that binds together geography and the human mind. It described the brain as a mosaic of areas, different in form and structure, that are responsible for the various physiological functions of the body. Franz Joseph Gall, the German scholar of anatomy and the creator of the concept, thought that from the size and shape of the skull one could tell the efficiency of memory, the fluency of speech, or even more abstract characteristics such as the strength of the attachment to the family home, or the capability of building hope. The more advanced the development of given qualities or predispositions, the more bulging the areas responsible for them. Jacubus Doornik compared phrenology to cartography: the scull is like a map which marks the spots of human perception, desires, weaknesses and habits.
Despite the fact that the 19th century metaphor of the human brain did not find scientific confirmation, it brings about the connotation to the phenomenological approach to place, which was propagated by humanistic geography in the 1970s. Humanistic geography defines place as an area accumulating emotions, habits and customs. Places appear gradually, they gain their 'bulge', their complexity and features over time, in the process of gathering memories and meanings.
The artists that have been invited to participate in the project document various places, such as utopian places (Paradise Recollected by Jasper Rigole), archetypical places (The Calendar by Agnieszka Polska), close places (diptychs from the Briesen series by Krzysztof Zieliński), historical places (Legend Coming True by Deimantas Narkevičius). They also picture spaces that do not belong to anyone, those that are described by Marc Augé as non-places (Here is Everywhere by Persijn Broersen i Margit Lukács). They speak of the longing for one's place in the world, as does HomeSICK by Šejla Kamerić, the work that opens the exhibition.
The continuous Wanderlust, a nostalgia for a foreign country, the necessity to escape and cross boundaries discussed by the artists, discourages from settling down. The topophilia – emotional, aesthetic or intellectual connection between a human being and a given place, is being replaced by topophobia – a hostility towards places. Contemporary tourists, migrants and virtual travelers are consistently losing their will to settle down. The continuous relocating and the process of erasing places from the memory is accompanied by the feeling of uncertainty and fear of the surrounding world, which in turn, paradoxically causes a longing for stability.
"The Past is a Foreign Country" will make a map of recreated and invented places, an accumulation of various emotions – nostalgia, despair, irony, happiness – thus posing the question: what is place today?
Artists: Johanna Billing / Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukács / Banu Cennetoglu / Šejla Kamerić / Deimantas Narkevičius / Agnieszka Polska / Jasper Rigole / Slavs and Tatars / Jutta Strohmaier / Levi van Veluw / Ingrid Wildi / Krzysztof Zieliński / Edwin Zwakman.
Curators: Aleksandra Kononiuk, Agnieszka Pindera
Exhibition design: Jeroen de Vries
Graphic design: Kasia Korczak & Boy Vereecken
Opening of the Exhibition: January 22, 2010, at 7.00 pm
Exhibition runs through May 2, 2010
Center of Contemporary Art "Znaki Czasu" in Toruń
ul. Wały gen. Sikorskiego 13, 87-100 Toruń
director: Stefan Mucha
tel. (+48 56) 610 97 00
fax (+48 56) 621 07 24
csw.torun.pl
Source: press release