Summary

Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA) is pleased to feature a group exhibition focusing on local artists from Europe and the Mediterranean exploring issues of memory, history, immigration, and displacement. The show features video, sculpture, book art, site-specific mixed media installation, and 2D works.

Project Description

These 10 artists have left their respective countries and cultures to make a home in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. Their relationship to history offers a fascinating contrast to an American past that "officially" extends up to 350 years ago, a fraction of the several thousand years that typically characterizes Europe and Asia Minor. Immigrating to America, is one really free of the past -- or does history somehow follow us to the ends of the earth? In a land of mediated images where nothing is outside the marketplace, what is the function of contemporary art? From Hungary to Holland, from Turkey to Germany, these artists have crisscrossed half the globe in the pursuit of such impossible questions.

Artist represented include Timea Tihanyi (Hungary), Sylwia Tur (Poland) , Ingrid Lahti (Finland), Iole Alessandrini (Italy), Anette Lusher (Germany), Evren Artiran (Turkey), Tobias Walther (Germany), Paula Stokes (Ireland), Hanita Schwartz (Israel) and Simon Kogan (Russia). Curated by David Francis and Ray C. Freeman III.

Iole Alessandrini

The experience of new places makes us feel alive. It is exciting; like opening your eyes for the first time.

As an emigrant I am guided by the habits of my native culture. As an immigrant I am consciously searching. In this fundamentally new environment of life abroad, searching involves the active re-imagining of a different present. In a sense it means creating the road I will travel along; shaping in the process a new identity. From here my old identity and home can be seen in relative perspective. The experience is strange, and flows with a sense of freedom that is liberating, challenging, and empowering.

In the exhibition

Marfa By Car is a collection of photographs from a trip that took 9 hours each way from Austin to Marfa, Texas, with friends to deliver their art to be exhibited at a private gallery. The timing of the exhibition coincided with the Chinati Foundation Open House. We traveled through small Texas towns bordering on a land that at times seemed outside of history. Without knowing it beforehand, I was recreating my experience of being in a foreign place, on a new road stretching out before me.