The art of resistance
KARACHI: Immigration, political resistance and digital influence are some of the themes explored in the Venice Biennale 2015 on tour exhibit which opened on Monday at Alliance Française de Karachi.
Titled Fabrik — On the Circulation of Data, Goods and People and part of the German Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, the exhibit features four works on display by the artists Olaf Nicolai, Jasmina Metwaly, Philip Rizk, Tobias Zielony and Hito Steyerl. Using video installations, photos and interactive instalments, each work explores the power of images and narratives.
In the ‘The Citizen’, Zielony questions the European media’s stereotyping of refugees as agitators. Using photos of African refugees in their everyday lives — laughing, cooking, sleeping and hanging out with their friends — the artist humanises them; the blank spaces framing the photographs a reminder of how the media often leaves out the other side of the story.
Zielony also asked African journalists and authors to comment on the photographs he had taken — the resultant articles push back against a negative Western narrative and capture the refugees’ spirit of resistance and resilience.
A similar technique is used with ‘GIRO (Tableaux)’ where Nicolai invites the viewer to examine the iconography of rooftops: two installations play footage captured by flying boomerangs while a wall displays various images.
There are snapshots from across history and places such as the first selfie taken in 1920 on the roof of the Marceau Studio in New York; Soviet soldiers hoisting a flag at the top of the Reichstag in Berlin in 1945 and Mexican prisoners
protesting their poor conditions in Tijuana in 2008 — all images that show how the rooftop can be a symbol of freedom, resistance, creativity and punishment.