Tag Archives: minorities
2010 | 2 channel video installation | Colour and black & white | Stereo sound | One loop 5:23min, one loop 8:35 min | Here the work is shown as a two-part video.
Photo © 2014 Robin Hanvelt
Little Mountain is a good example of the consequences of local government abdicating its responsibility in favour of speculative investors. The destruction of the residential estate displaced a large number of families in favour of a speculative gentrification project which is to include only a small percentage of social housing. It is the kind of confrontation common throughout much of the Western world as governments move away from intervening in the economy as the welfare state towards providing an attractive investment climate for entrepreneurs as the “competition state”.
Little Mountain, 2010 · Category: Installations
Tags: gentrification, minorities, privatisation of communal property, social housing, speculation
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
2004 | 13 colour photos (6 digitally altered photos, 7 text images). Each approx. 60 x 70 cm (framed). Image size approx. 40 x 50 cm.
The series re-works 6 hand-coloured photographs from the end of the 19th century showing Heligoland, Norderney and Venice. Inserted into the settings (tourist, travel and holiday destinations) is a single image of a young woman, a Berber from North Africa, probably Algeria. It is taken from a two volume work published in Berlin in 1910 – Das Weib im Leben der Völker by Albert Friedenthal, most “from my own collection,” as the author says.
Interwoven with these historically contiguous elements are seven texts in the form of separate, extended quotations from SCRAM: Relocating under a new Identity by James S. Martin. The short ‘captions’ at the bottom of the photos themselves also come from this source. Published in Washington in 1993, the book is effectively a handbook with legal and not so legal tips about how to divest oneself of one identity and acquire another. Wiping the slate clean. Building a new life. Starting again somewhere else. It demands the total erasure of one life and the assumption of another, justifying it by the fact that the authorities provide the same “service” and relocation possibilities to criminals. Read More…