Presentation and talk with Paris Furst on November 4 at 7 p.m. in the seminar room of the Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art.
Admission is free, the lecture and talk will be in German and English.
For visitors to the 2015 Venice Biennale (“All The World’s Futures”, curated by Okwui Enwezor), the presence of street vendors at the gates of the Biennale was hard to miss. These new merchants of Venice, omnipresent with their selfie sticks, roses, umbrellas, toys and sunglasses, cavort in front of the barriers, unable to penetrate the white walls of the Biennale’s critical discourse – including the art projects that supposedly deal with the circumstances of their existence. The ticket price is 25 euros, unaffordable for the traveling merchants. We find ourselves in an era in which capital is everywhere overcoming the boundaries where bodies fail and only language remains as a weapon.
The audio installation Voglio Andare alla Biennale (I want to go to the Biennale) shows the story of “Narshingdi”, a selfie-stick seller who tells the story of a life on the street, across continents, between legality and illegality and finally back to a quest for the idea of a home in a foreign country.
The presentation will be accompanied by German and English subtitles. The discussion will shed light on the origins of the project and relate it to the context of the Venice Biennale and its reception within the Bengali community in Venice(http://voglioandare.org) and the Nationless Pavilion(http://www.nation25.com/vuoto).
The audio installation Voglio andare alla Biennale (I want to go to the Biennial) 2015, is a joint project by Naeem Mohaiemen and Paris Furst .
Naeem Mohaiemen is present in the upcoming exhibition The Fevered Specters of Art – Die fiebrigen Gespenster der Kunst.
Paris Furst studied political science, art and philosophy in North Carolina, Paris, Vienna, Florence and Berlin. Her research and work focuses on language, nationality, emancipatory movements and questioning the differences between knowledge and belief. Current projects include a collective city map of the island of Elephantine in Egypt, located in the Nile, and photographs of migration histories between Europe and former colonies in Africa and South America.
Naeem Mohaiemen combines film, photography, and academic essays to explore borders, wars, and postcolonial affiliations in Southeast Asia. From 2001 to 2006 he was a member of the Visible Collective (disappearedinamerica.org). His works have been presented internationally: Oberhausen, Muffathalle / Munich, Transmediale / Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Kunsthalle Basel, Museum of Modern Art / New York, as well as the Biennales in Venice, Marrakesh and Sharjah. Mohaiemen is a doctoral candidate in historical anthropology at Columbia University.