In an old anecdote about two emigrants in Europe, one tells the other that he plans to migrate to Uruguay. He receives the surprised reaction of, 'Oh, that’s far away!' The man responds: ‘Far away from where?’
The questions of how we perceive distance are collapsing as cultural, political and physical geographies are coming closer together through the shared experience of ‘being wounded’: sites of conflict, places scarred by war and turmoil, by refugee settlements that become permanent. The Far Away from Where? exhibition explores the implications of shifting and volatile experiences in an era of physical displacement and digital connectivity.
The artists in the multi-media exhibition – from Armenia, Syria, Bulgaria, Lebanon, New York and Poland, draw from the rich historic legacies of spaces, transforming them through their works and through their engagement with viewers. Małgorzata Bakalarz-Duverger, curator of the exhibition and a doctoral candidate in sociology at the New School for Social Research, explains:
Physical distance is neither an excuse for oblivion nor for silence. In bringing shared experiences within divergent histories to the forefront, these artists demonstrate that wounded places are always much closer than they seem to be.
The multi-media exhibition Far Away from Home will feature works by Tymek Borowski, Yana Dimitrova, Elżbieta Janicka & Wojtek Wilczyk, Simona Prives, Jayce Salloum, Hrair Sarkissian, and Daniel Toretsky, with a site-specific project by students from the Parsons School of Design: Mackenzie Drummond (Integrated Design); James Hernandez (Photography); Larisa Karamchakova (Urban Design); and Damien Karan, (Photography).
The show ends with an international symposium that looks at the conditions and possibilities of Making Home in Wounded Places: Design, Memory, and the Spatial, with a keynote address by Lina Sergie Attar, a Syrian American architect and activist from Aleppo.
The exhibition and the symposium are organised in collaboration with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute as a part of the Campus Project.
Follow-up course in Warsaw
The project also includes programmes, courses and exhibitions in participating countries. The Palace of Culture: An Exploration in Design, Humanities, and Social Sciences course will take place in the heart of Warsaw, in the Palace of Culture itself , from 18th –28th March 2017. The Palace leads complex lives: symbolic, ideological, historical, practical, and infrastructural. This international project, brings together matters of history, architecture, and the urban future, in order to develop new capacities and strategies for design education.
Seniors and graduate students from Parsons School of Design and The New School for Social Research in New York, and seniors and graduate students from the School of Form in Poznań, will collaborate in a design workshop that will move from a rigorous but imaginative research into contemporary urban complexities to the creation of speculative design propositions. Students will discuss the nature of memory and complexity of spatial interventions as political gestures and will work in teams to propose alternative visions for this site (or others like it elsewhere in the world, i.e., the Freedom Tower in NYC).
The course is offered in conjunction with the Making Home in Wounded Place: Memory, Design, and the Spatial symposium, and the Far Away from Where? exhibition, both held at Parsons.
Source: press materials; edited by NR, 13 Feb 2017