Category Archives: Texts/CD/DVD-R
2012 | Text/image contribution to a fax exhibition on the notion of bread and salt as ritual gifts of welcome.
The text is a reaction to the exhibition statement: ‘Bread and salt are gifts that stand for good neighbourliness, for hopes of prosperity and for the notion of extending hospitality and protection to strangers’.
Further text material (PDF):
Bread and Salt, 2012 · Category: Texts/CD/DVD-R
Tags: hospitality, immigrants, rituals, travellers, welcome
2008 | 4 channel video installation: 2 screens/2 monitors. Text roller. | 360° library (4 min 10 sec loop), Gericault tomb (9 min 33 sec loop), Archive pan (1 min 03 sec loop), Pages in wind (5 min 20 sec loop) – All 4:3 / PAL / colour / sound | Text (50 mins) – Widescreen
High up on a cliff on the outskirts of Dakar, Senegal, there is a disused public building, the old Palais de Justice. It was built during the last years of French colonial occupation and for more than quarter of a century has ceased functioning as the civil and criminal court it once was. It forms the core of the video installation that reflects on the building itself, its erstwhile function as well as wider issues and associations such as the nature of memory, historical contextualisation, biographical recollections and record keeping as a means of imposing and maintaining control of a (colonial) population.
Cap Manuel, 2008 · Category: Installations, Texts/CD/DVD-R
Tags: architecture, biographical recollections, colonial record keeping, oral vs written history
2008 | DVD ROM containing text, photos, video and sound | In Bulgarian, German and English | Code by dfkt | The project was undertaken with Lisl Ponger and commissioned by the evn collection. It deals with the central region of Bulgaria—from Sofia to the Black Sea—where the evn has its business responsibilities.
Ponger and Sharp engage in transdisciplinary work at the interfaces of art and film, art and science, art and politics, ethnology, sociology, art and history, society, migration and democracy. They move elegantly across the terrain where progressive contemporary discourse begins and, with their Logbook, they dock onto a Europe which is increasingly coming to regard itself as less an economic union and much more a cultural community and observe the seismic waves that run through the hierarchies of the European area. (…) Read More…
Logbook 2006/2007: A Bulgarian Journey, 2008 · Category: Texts/CD/DVD-R
Tags: bulgaria, electricity, minorities, political and cultural history, tourism
2006 | Project for Museum in Progress [Verborgene Gesichten/Remapping Mozart] for publication in Der Standard, 13 April 2006
Adam Smith, Daniel Houghton, Mozart and pauperised workers…
2004 | CD ROM /Web Project
ImagiNative is a joint web/CD project with Lisl Ponger commissioned by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt for The Black Atlantic exhibition in 2004. We were interested in exploring how images are crucial in forming attitudes and identities in our society and in constructing the identities—imagined, imposed, resisted—of Others. ImagiNative was made in order to contextualize our work, to allow direct insight into the work process itself. As such, it is a sort of ‘reverse engineering’ project which collects together materials from various areas which touch on many of the issues with which we are concerned. These include the production of stereotypes, orientalism, ethnology (and notions such as authentic and inauthentic artefacts and customs), migration, travel and tourism (who travels, and why), racism (and associated pseudo-sciences) and the role of image-making in all of this.
The project is available online in English and German at http://imaginative.lislponger.com/
ImagiNative: Research as Artistic Strategy, 2004 · Category: Texts/CD/DVD-R
Tags: art, ethnology, migration, orientalism, racism, research, stereotypes, tourism, travel
1992 | Installation: dimensions variable | Approx. 150 objects | Paper mache, metal grid, clay, alkyd paint, wax, dyes etc.
The installation investigates the weighting of textual/documentation material in connection with (allegedly) archaeological objects and the story of the find. The fragmentary text follows the story of the find, theft and subsequent purchase of materials which are brought together for the first time at some point in the not too distant future. Read More…
The Peter Kien Project, 1992 · Category: Installations, Objects, Texts/CD/DVD-R
Tags: archaeology, authenticity, history, museology, textual authority