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ORIGINALFASSUNG #76: Tintin Wulia. Artist Talk. |
// Date: Wednesday, October 19, 2011 // Time: 19h30
OF #76: PLAYGROUND TALES stories of games, fluke and the border
Tintin Wulia is currently doing a residency at ZKM Karlsruhe as part of the exhibition The Global Contemporary – Art Worlds After 1989. She will come to Berlin to prepare her next interactive installation, that will potentially involve both the cities of Karlsruhe and Berlin. For that occasion, we invited her to give a presentation about her latest works.
The artist is interested in the different qualities of borders, such as spatial-geographical borders or cultural-ethnical borders, and its connection to mechanisms of power. Accordingly, she also explores the subject of migration in geopolitical terms. The artist works with objects, such as maps, passports or official family documents. She creates interactive installations that comprise a variety of media, such as videos, murals, texts, objects and performances, and encourages the audience to take active part in them.
Elements of chance and magic are part of her reflections about power dynamics in society, in the form of citizenship, ownership, local or global boundaries of language, space and time.
The event is hosted by Originalfassung and Arts and Conversation.
Arts and Conversation was initiated by Katerina Valdivia Bruch in 2007. It started first as a “living room” project called Haus Bruch, in which invited art practitioners gave a talk about their work. The invited participants were developing work in Berlin, so that most part of the presentations were about an ongoing project. The concept has been extended to invite experts in the field of cultural and/or social studies and humanities to do a presentation in Berlin.
Organised by Katerina Valdivia Bruch with the support of the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations (IfA)
__ Tintin Wulia
When I was thirteen, I wished that Peter Pan would lose his shadow in my tiny island of Bali, because I thought that Peter Pan was kinda sexy. Night after night, I would think a happy thought, wishing that Peter would find me if I could fly. Nothing happened – I discovered that Peter had much preferred Wendy.
Two decades and almost six years later, I’m still discovering many things. One, that Peter Pan is a fictional character invented by James Matthew Barrie. Two, that the fact that Peter is fictional doesn’t mean that he’s illusory. I’m also discovering that, three, it is not a happy thought that one needs to be able to fly – it is, rather, the combination of a passport and a valid visa. And also, four, that the fact that one needs a passport and a valid visa to be able to fly is just shitty.
So one morning, I decided to solve that shitty problem. I acquired a permanent residency visa in a big island called Australia, and started my quest to collect passports from all the countries on earth. At the moment I have 140. The task is never ending – new countries keep coming, old countries keep dying. But at least no other artists, not even Arthur Cravan, have ever had any more passports than I do now.
With my 140 passports, I am undeniably the most international artist in the universe, and the world is my playground. The journey has never been so exciting: three weeks ago I got stranded in Frankfurt Flughafen, being refused entry to Germany, while I was actually supposed to be in Karlsruhe to play mapmaking with the crowd there. My 140 passports were still in Paris, so I couldn’t show them to the border police. I was under close guard until I won another passport control game at Domodedovo, Moscow, and rewarded an entry to Russia where I had to setup yet another game of chance.
How did I get to this point? Why do I play with the border so compulsively? Do I really believe in serendipity? And what do I think about Wendy? These are not easy questions, but I will try to answer them through a sequence of my playground tales at Originalfassung next week.
(Please note that this text and the presentation are not part of my PhD project conducted at RMIT University, Australia.) __
Further Information:
> on Tintin Wulia
Photo: (Re)Collection of Togetherness - stage 6, © Tintin Wulia, 2011
Interactive performance and Installation with single-channel video projection
Image courtesy of the artist and Louis Vuitton Malletier
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> October 19, 2011
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