- Manal Abu-Shaheen
- Vahap Avşar
- Jesus Benavente and Felipe Castelblanco
- Brian Caverly
- Kerry Downey
- Magali Duzant
- Golnaz Esmaili
- Mohammed Fayaz
- Kate Gilmore
- Jonah Groeneboer
- Bang Geul Han and Minna Pöllänen
- Dave Hardy
- Sylvia Hardy
- Shadi Harouni
- Janks Archive
- Robin Kang
- Kristin Lucas
- Carl Marin
- Eileen Maxson
- Melanie McLain
- Shane Mecklenburger
- Lawrence Mesich
- Freya Powell
- Xiaoshi Vivian Vivian Qin
- Alan Ruiz
- Samita Sinha and Brian Chase
- Barb Smith
- Monika Sziladi
- Alina Tenser
- Trans-Pecos with 8 Ball Community, E.S.P. TV, and Chillin Island
- Mark Tribe
- Sam Vernon
- Max Warsh
- Jennifer Williams
- An Itinerary with Notes
- Exhibition Views
- Hidden
- Watershed
- A Distant Memory Being Recalled (Queens Teens Respond)
- Overhead: A Response to Kerry Downey’s Fishing with Angela
- Sweat, Leaks, Holes: Crossing the Threshold
- PULSE: On Jonah Groeneboer’s The Potential in Waves Colliding
- Interview: Melanie McLain and Alina Tenser
- Personal Space
- Data, the Social Being, and the Social Network
- Responses from Mechanical Turk
- MAPS, DNA, AND SPAM
- Queens Internacional 2016
- Uneven Development: On Beirut and Plein Air
- A Crisis of Context
- Return to Sender
- Interview: Vahap Avşar and Shadi Harouni
- Mining Through History: The Contemporary Practices of Vahap Avşar and Shadi Harouni
- A Conversation with Shadi Harouni's The Lightest of Stones
- Directions to a Gravel Quarry
- Walk This Way
- Interview: Brian Caverly and Barb Smith
- "I drew the one that has the teeth marks..."
- BEAT IT! (Queens Teens respond)
- Moments
- Lawn Furniture
- In Between Difference, Repetition, and Original Use
- Interview: Dave Hardy and Max Warsh
- Again—and again: on the recent work of Alan Ruiz
- City of Tomorrow
- Noticing This Space
- NO PLACE FOR A MAP
- The History of the World Was with Me That Night
- What You Don't See (Queens Teens Respond)
- Interview: Allison Davis and Sam Vernon
- When You’re Smiling…The Many Faces Behind the Mask
- Interview: Jesus Benavente and Carl Marin
- The Eternal Insult
- Janking Off
- Queens Theatricality
In the globalized world we live in, traditions are lost, culture is flattened, and our understanding of cultures—others and our own—decreases with the perpetuation of stereotypes. As an attempt to reconnect with their own heritage, contemporary artists are mining, literally and metaphorically, through history. This appears many times without nostalgia or irony in the current Queens International. In Lost Shadows, [AND Museum] (2015-16), Vahap Avşar displays a set of postcards featuring photos taken in his native Turkey in the 1970s and 80s. These photos come from the archive of the AND Postcard Company, all images that were not chosen for publication, but rejected by the government. Images of everyday Turkish life appear: a soldier sitting on a hill reading a piece of mail, officials walking around the grounds before a wrestling tournament. While these moments seem insignificant, they are now brought back as collective memory, reinserted into the historical record. In the gallery, the recontextualized images become part of an ongoing dialogue about history, its editing, and how we understand it. Displayed so that viewers can take a postcard home with them, the piece extends the artist’s experience of mining through the collection. Questions arise here: How will these mementos play into the understanding of Turkey thirty to forty years after their initial creation? How does this understanding differ between the artist and his audience? And how will these images be woven into an American understanding of Middle Eastern culture?
The men seen in Shadi Harouni’s video, The Lightest of Stones (2015) wonder the same thing. The video, documentation of the artist literally mining pumice stone by hand at an Iranian quarry, also shows five Iranian men standing behind her, talking while she works. They are all miners. As she works, silently, doggedly, never showing us her face, they critique her, but move into easy, everyday conversation about the mines, America, and art. They wonder aloud how this video—this art—will be understood in America, where it will be shown. Will they assume by looking at the quarry that they are part of ISIS? That they are lazy men who simply stand and shoot the breeze while they watch a woman work? The larger question, in the end, becomes about the art itself. Is the art simply the futility of mining by hand, or is it the mining of these stories, these conversations, these worries of the people who surround her? What does it add to our understanding of their culture, of art, or of ourselves? Harouni and Avşar provide us ways to reconnect with the dialogues around us and open new possibilities for cultural exchange.
This text was written for Professor Kim Connerton, Ph.D., “Installation Art: Design & Change” 2016 Spring semester at Pratt Institute in the History of Art & Design Graduate Program.
Teresa Lundgren is a graduate student at Pratt Institute in Fine Art and History of Art and Design. Her work focuses on epistemology and the representation of cultural identity in contemporary art. She previously taught art and philosophy at a secondary school in Dubai, UAE.