Some 20 visual artists from France, Israel, Ireland, Canada, the Czech Republic and China, to name but a few, take on such questions as: what rights does a national space give us? Where do we fit in society if we are excluded from this space? What are the possibilities for a new citizenship of the 21st century?
Their work has been compiled by a curatorial team made up of UK-based Cynthia Morrison-Bell and Brazilian Laymert Garcia dos Santos.
Most dictionary definitions point to citizenship as the relationship of the individual belonging to a space- whether nation state or city – legislated by law. However, Citizens examines the nature of this relationship, exploring new ways of thinking about and engaging with space, beyond that of territoriality, of boundaries and frontiers.
The works take in a range of media from video and digital installation to more traditional formats, including photography and painting.
Brazilian artist Maurico Dias and Swiss artist Walter Riedweg look at the plight of illegal immigrants who pass from Mexico to the United States. Their multimedia installation focuses on the relationship between the immigrants and the Alsatian dogs trained to hunt them down.
Rubens Mano, also from Brazil, uses his work Disposal/ Disponha to examine the experience of belonging to intermediary civic spaces.
This photographic diptych captures an urban environment and uses a perceptual shift in the interval between two images to position the viewer between two experiences of civic space.
The Raqs Media Collective, a group of Delhi-based media practitioners working in inter-media installations, new media, video, sound, photography and text, also looks at the citizen of transitory zones.
Lost New Shoes is a specially commissioned installation that looks at the ‘denizen’, someone who is not yet or is unable to become a citizen.
Raqs Media Collective has used the metaphor of new but untried shoes to represent such an individual’s experience of citizenship.
Essentially, Citizens offers the viewer a chance to consider whether citizenship is an outmoded and obselete notion.
Using artistic means, the exhibition tackles the theory that as the world becomes more populated, globalised, multicultural and technological, countries and individuals are being forced to reassess their identities and reconsider ‘nationhood’.
