The seven artists selected to explore the annual theme Ties That Bind are showcased in Zagreb till November 3, 2024. In 2025, the exhibition will travel to Fotograf Magazine in Prague and The Bienal Fotografia do Porto in Porto.
Organ Vida Festival, Bienal Fotografia do Porto, Fotogalleriet and Fotograf Magazine have curated the Open Call, inviting the artists "to challenge, untie, and move beyond familial ties”. This year's theme “explores new, meaningful ways to belong, connect, and experience closeness. It imagines new forms of attachment and kinship that could exist beyond familiar social structures, relationships, and species…or grow from within their loopholes [...]. Ties That Bind dares us to challenge and raise questions, including those that are mischievous, fun, and dissident. It embraces projects that embody fragmented, contradictory, and open constructions of our individual and collective selves".
The exhibition Ties That Bind presents seven projects that explore various forms of attachments and connections within different social structures and relationships.
Interwoven ties where past meets the present are visible in Dev Dhunsi‘s work Tales They Don’t Tell You. Through untold mythical tales from the Vedas, including a story of gay love, Dhunsi speaks about broader connections between world geographies. Combining cylindrical water sculptures and images woven into textiles, the work emphasizes the symbolic power of water that connects and divides us.
Archival images translated in new contexts are present in the work The Mummy Eye by Donja Nasseri. In this ongoing project the artist works with the collection of the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum (RJM) in Cologne, revealing an intricate web of relationships that are the result of human misconduct or violent colonial past. The mummy eye is the first object from the series that she exhibits in different formats, combining sophisticated 3D printing techniques with more traditional watercolors.
Coming from a place of healing or transformation is work by Angyvir Padilla Home Unfoldable Home. Flashbacks. Using mainly archival photography of her family home in Venezuela, she explores intimate family bonds that shape our identities even from afar. Her mother’s photographes are transformed into sculptures in which depicted motifs, always veiled by paraffin, appear almost too blurred to discern. Faded imagery layered with different textures accentuates artist’s relationships with photographic memory and connected questions of belonging.
Both Jan Durina and Ihar Hancharuk identify in their works how public opinion is being shaped by political discourse which often grows us apart instead of bringing us together. While in his work I Was Going to Be a Great Person Jan Durina shows how hate-fueled rhetoric results in concrete violent actions directed mainly towards queer people, in What if I am a spy? Ihar Hancharuk focuses more on tensions, suspicions and public paranoia that through images instantly become palpable. These works bring to light complicated political situations where control, distrust and hate dominate and define mass consciousness. Wrongly shaped values easily become part of hostile national identities where there is no room for solidarity or genuine care.
Disillusionment with existing attachments can make us tweak our parameters and set our values straight, allowing ourselves to imagine new forms of kinship that could exist beyond familiar social structures, relationships, species… Or grow from within their loopholes. Between Two Trees, There Are Many Worlds is a work by Sheung Yiu which explores the entanglement of biological and technological ecologies in contemporary life. By using the ongoing bark beetle infestation in Northern Europe, this extensive project compares the optical scientific measurements of the forest with the chemical sensing of the living creatures in the woods. The video essay, which serves as a focal point of the installation, sheds light to limitations of human-centered view on landscape that neglects interspecies communication.
Thinking about communication in a more speculative way is a series of photographs Off the map by Sasha Chaika. They explore new ways of kinship that are not dependent on language which can feel limiting when imposing labels or further strengthening stigmas. Chaika tries to capture and visualize different affective connections that circulate between subjects, relying more on haptic experiences than predetermined definitions.
Ties That Bind Zagreb exhibition is curated by Organ Vida Festival.
Exhibition Run 26 September - 03 November 2024
At Museum of Contemporary Art - Zagreb (Croatia)
More info at http://www.msu.hr/hr/
In 2025, Ties That Bind will travel to Fotograf Magazine and The Bienal Fotografia do Porto.
Credit images Organ Vida.
With the support of the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.
