Opened: January 21, 2012
Closed: April 1, 2012
Location: In the Bartels Gallery, Floor 1L, and the Moak, Class of 1953, Schaenen, Opatrny, and wing galleries, Floor 2L
The exhibition is part of an ongoing project initiated in 2005 by Green Cardamom, a London-based nonprofit arts organization.
Artists who represented: Bani Abidi, Francis Alÿs, Sarnath Banerjee, Farida Batool, Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Muhanned Cader, Duncan Campbell, Iftikhar Dadi, DAAR, Anita Dube, Taghreed Elsanhouri, Sophie Ernst, Gauri Gill, Shilpa Gupta, Zarina Hashmi, Emily Jacir, Ahsan Jamal, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Amar Kanwar, Noa Lidor, Mario Mabor, Nalini Malani, Naeem Mohaiemen, Tom Molloy, Rashid Rana, Raqs Media Collective, Jolene Rickard, Hrair Sarkissian, Seher Shah, Surekha, Hajra Waheed, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, and Muhammad Zeeshan.
Curator: This exhibition is co-curated by Hammad Nasar (curator and co-founder of Green Cardamom) and Iftikhar Dadi (Associate Professor of Art History and Department Chair Art at Cornell University).
Line of control: the exhibition is about Partition as a Productive Space investigates the historic upheaval of the 1947 partition of India that spawned the nations of Pakistan and later Bangladesh.
- Not only that it also addresses physical and psychological borders, trauma, and the reconfiguration of memory in other partitioned areas: North and South Korea, Sudan and South Sudan, Israel and Palestine, Ireland and Northern Ireland, Armenia and its diaspora, and questions of indigenous sovereignty in the United States
- It shows how living within and across these partition lines can be a messy, bloody business but also offers a productive space where new nations, identities, languages, and relationships emerge.
- The exhibition explores the products and remainders of partition and borders characteristic of the modern nation-state, and includes the continued impact of colonization, the physical and psychic violence of displacement, dilemmas of identity and belonging, and questions of commemoration.
- More than forty works of video, prints, photographs, paintings, sculpture, and installation by international artists delve into the past and explore the present to expose the seductive simplicity of drawing lines as a substitute for learning how to live with each other.
http://museum.cornell.edu/exhibitions/view/lines-of-control.html
http://nasher.duke.edu/exhibitions/lines-of-control/
Sophie Ernst
Home: Gulzar 2008-11
HOME is a major ongoing project confronting political turmoil and displacement with individual memories of home and ideal places. Ernst interviews people forced to leave their homes due to political upheaval, such as during the Partition of South Asia in 1947, and builds an architectural model of the houses they describe. She then projects onto this sculpture video footage of the person’s hands as they describe their memory of that building, transforming the inanimate object into a virtually inhabited space, and ascribing a profound intimacy.
It is said by Eliza Williams, Frieze Magazine that “The most affecting work in ‘Lines of Control’ is a piece by the Berlin-based artist Sophie Ernst, which addresses displacement through interviews with people who lived through it.”
Sophie says herself that The HOME project examines the opposite situation: peoples talk of places they left at a definite moment in time, but while they remember it, time extends into eternity. I try to translate this transformation into a spatial installation combining imagined or remembered pictures with narrative and a projection “screen”. It is their “recherche du temps perdu” which I have to express in sculptural terms. Although the frame of reference of the interviews is specific to context and people, I don’t want to reduce the work to a historical illustration. The question is: If and how a time-specific personal memory translates into a general image of our past and how this is carried on into the future on a local and global level.”