Ghosts from Afar
An Online Video Exhibition curated by Anna Goetz, with works by Bady Dalloul, Jane Jin Kaisen and Guston Sondin-Kung, Minouk Lim, Amapola Prada, and Tuan Andrew Nguyen. I am fascinated by the process of ‘writing’ history – and how we, the people affected by it, are always witnesses, yet never actors in it. – Bady Dalloul Ghosts from Afar examines the effects of the increasing dissolution of the border between near and far as a result of increasing mobility and migration of people and cultures in our postcolonial and globalized age. The artists trace the far-reaching and long-lasting effects of narratives produced by political interests on subjects and their realities, exploring how lived and remembered experiences can influence one’s identity and personal trajectories across generations. The artists reinterpret “history” from a subjective-biographical experience and question foundational fictions by exploring their own experiences and family history or that of their interlocutor. While Minouk Lim considers urban space as a vessel for memory, the artist Amapola Prada discusses the body as a repository for one’s history. The other three artists deal with memory (or gaps in memory) and how it shapes identities. Their medium, however, is that of their protagonists’ family history and the experiences they have had in order to find out who they are and at the same time to question the official historiographies. In Minouk Lim’s New Town Ghost (2005), a slam poet and a drummer ride on a truck through a district in Seoul that was recently “developed,” and whose residents were displaced in the name of progress. The poet angrily denounces the loss of space to the “ghosts of modernization” summoned by neoliberal ideologies, mourning the place’s history and that of its inhabitants that have been erased. Faced with an urban landscape in constant motion, the performer in Amapola Prada’s video Unit/y (2013) manifests her presence as an individual by withdrawing from movement and simply standing still. Her performative action positions herself as a counterforce to discourses that construct bodies through categories such as race, social class, and gender, and the history of oppression and repression that mark her body and experience in Peru. Bady Dalloul’s Scrapbook (2015) presents a book he found filled with pressed origami animals. Dalloul implies they were folded by a girl who, after being irradiated by the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, believed they would give her the wish to live. Using handwritten notes, postcards, photographs, and various snippets interwoven with the paper creatures, he used this found object to map out the history of his family, and thus his own, against the backdrop of occupation, colonization, and displacement in Syria and Palestine. In doing so he creates a narrative that mixes fact with fiction, combining official truths with alternative fictional conclusions and the account of individual experience to question official historiography. Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s Il n’y a pas d’Indochine is one of three narratives from the installation The Specter of Ancestors Becoming (2019), for which he collaborated with Vietnamese-Senegalese descendants to imagine conversations with or between their parents or grandparents. In the late 1940s, the French colonial power recruited soldiers from Senegal to fight the VietCong. After the war, many of these soldiers returned to West Africa, some accompanied by their Vietnamese wives and children, while others brought only their offspring and raised them in Senegal with no connection to their origins. The dialogue reflects the complex relationship between the subjects of colonized societies played against each other by colonial forces, determined by power struggles across skin color, class, and creed that continue to reverberate through their descendants to the present time. Nguyen gives space to these complex and far-reaching effects of colonialism on personal biographies that are not accounted for in grand narratives of history. In The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger (2010), Jane Jin Kaisen and Guston Sondin-Kung portray a group of international adoptees and other women from the Korean diaspora exploring their biographical connection to the country, which is marked by Japanese colonialism, U. S. militarism, or industrialization that led to international mass adoption of its people to reduce the population. The filmic narrative unfolds through the juxtaposition and reinterpretation of historical archival and documentary material and the uncovering of personal memories that reveal an intertwining of colonialism, patriarchy, racism, nationalism, and neoliberalism, revealing stories that have been repressed or constructed to cover up histories of marginalization, pain, and violence. In many cases, stories are kept secret by those directly affected because they are associated with shame; however, as one protagonist describes, “in that space of not knowing there is imagination.[…] The secret itself, or the gap in [someone’s account] gives rise to a ghost, [that] like a sense of being haunted” is passed down through generations in the form of a trauma. –Anna Goetz About the curator Curator and writer Anna Goetz has been working as independent curator and writer between Mexico City and Basel, Switzerland. The main focus of interest in her work is on artistic strategies that expose and investigate prevailing hierarchies, narratives, and structures in society. More recently, she has also begun to explore the impact of the historical relationship between Latin America and the Middle East on the transnational-territorial experience of many artists from these regions and their work. Her last institutional appointment was at MMK Museum for Modern Art Frankfurt (2013–2017), where she curated exhibitions by Ed Atkins, Laure Prouvost, Florian Hecker, Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Isa Genzken, and Subodh Gupta, and led the prestigious MMK Talks program Art&Politics with guests such as Banu Cenneto?lu, Vasif Kortun, Kader Attia, Jimmie Durham, Dirk Snauwaert, and Hans Haacke. Before, she was Assistant curator for the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennial 2013, Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof and the Frankfurter Kunstverein. Parallel to her curatorial practice, she has been writing for international art magazines, such as Artforum, Frieze, and Mousse, taught at various art academies and universities, and ran the project space Roberta in Frankfurt (2015-2017).