The work of Bouchra Khalili is very simple in its presentation. Although it takes up a whole room, it only consists of eight screens. Each video is of an immigrant’s journey told through the visuals of maps. The camera is still the whole time. The emotional investment we get is all from the stories that each person tells using a sharpie and tracing his or her difficult journey in the map. Although we think of immigration as one person going from one place moves to another, it is far more complicated than that. It often takes many cities and many travels to finally settle on a place that you can home. In all eight stories, the immigrants had to jump from place to place, getting there by boat or road.

 

It’s interested how Khalili decided to present these stories. The stories are simple and stripped of much details. We don’t even see the faces of the people. It’s very intriguing that although thousands of people cross over to the United States, we don’t know their stories and we don’t know their faces. They’re seen as a threat. The refugees in Europe are sometimes blamed for horrible acts. In very few visuals or camera tricks, the artist was able to capture the importance of immigration and its political and economic implications.

For my second post, I went to MOMA. In the second floor, tucked in a corner far away from the larger displays, is a small screen. The work, Broken mirror by Song Dong, is so small a video installation that you can almost miss it. Mr. Dong has had other work at MOMA.  In 2009, he has a large installation that consisted of hundreds of pieces from his childhood in China. Although the two works are different in scope. Mr. Dong explores similar themes in both works. As an artist, Song Dong is interested in exploring the past, present, and future. He likes to contrast the traditional with consumerism. As China has grown into a super economic power, its society is facing a shift from its nationalist identity into a culture of modernism and and consumerism. The rise of cheap labor and global companies has choked China with smog and high rise buildings. It is not uncommon to see multi- millionaire neighborhoods shove shoulders with the poorest districts in the country.

In Broken glass, we are presented with an image of a man walking and another man riding a bike reflected in a mirror. Seconds later, a hammer appears. It disrupts our perception of what we just saw. The hammer holds for a few seconds of suspense. There’s an inevitability of destruction that keeps us wondering.  The hammer bangs on the mirror to break it. Sometimes, it takes two strikes. At some points, people quickly react when they hear the mirror breaking. As the mirror breaks, another scene reveals. The artists does this a more few times, comparing cars with scenes of quiet parks.  I think that this creates an illusion of how we perceive reality. Our environment is always changing and because we are always adapting, we don’t become aware of the changes in our society. This disruptive change of scenes makes us think about these changes.

For the outside screening, I decided to go the media collection at MOMA. In the second floor, tucked away in a corner from the bigger exhibitions is a screen with a few small benches. Screening in this corner is “November” by Hito Steyerl. The piece is a compilation of personal footage taken by Hito, interviews, and stock footage from Bruce Lee movies and Kurdish television. This combination of material blurs the line between what is true and what is fictional. The artist has refused to call her piece a documentary. Rather, it is a portrait of her deceased friend by associated her with different images of uprisings and revolutions.

Hito Steyerl starts her piece in these words, “My best friend when I was 17, was a girl called Andrea Wolf. She died 4 years ago, when she was shot as a Kurdish terrorist.” She goes on to show us a home video that she made with Andrea on her Super- 8. It is a Kung- Fu action film with strong feminist themes. Andrea plays the hero that gets to beat up every male in site. In voice over, Steyerl explains that in this world, only bad guys have weapons and only the hero uses their fists to fight.

The film was made when Hito Steyerl was very young. She made it with her friends without any particular intention. It is only after the death of Andrea Wolf that the piece took on a meaning. Andrea was killed by the Turkish army after she join a Kurdish army of women. Shortly after her death, she became a symbol of revolution. It is after this that the silly and tacky Kung- Fu video became a symbol of rebellion. With this perspective, Hito Steryl dissects her amateur video through the eyes of war.

It is interesting that something we create at an innocent age, something that we may not have thought much about after creating it can obtain a different meaning. To Hito, the video that she made with her friend meant freedom and justice after her death. These shifting meanings made me think about videos and artwork that I made when I was younger. It made me think about the possible ways in which I can interpret these pieces looking back after so many years and how the way I look at it defines me. I remember talking to an artist a few months back that spoke about the meaning of her art. She told me that after she finishes painting her piece, it doesn’t matter what her intentions were in the beginning. Different people in different generations will look at it in different ways.

Hito Steyerl redefined her film with her friend by associating it with the fighting mentality found in old- school Kung Fu featuring Bruce Lee and images of revolution taken from Kurdish documentaries.