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Feb. 15, 2013
Memory and identity merge
Belkin Gallery displays works by artist Esther Shalev-Gerz.
OLGA LIVSHIN
Interconnected themes of history, memory and identity, both personal and national, run through Esther Shalev-Gerz’s art. Like threads, they link together the artist’s works of the past two decades. Her first solo show in Canada, a sort of retrospective, emphasizes those themes, simultaneously giving them a local focus. The show opened last year in Kamloops Art Gallery (KAG). This January, the expanded version opened at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia.
Although Shalev-Gerz lives in France and teaches in Sweden, her association with Canada is of long standing. “I came to B.C., Hornby Island, in 1984,” she said in an e-mail interview from Paris. “It was art and love that brought me there. I continue coming for the last 28 years, as I found the place has the best of all worlds: nature in its authentic wilderness, undisturbed and, at the same time, accessible as sort of inspiration, distraction and renewal, the real drama that doesn’t need us, the humans.
“The human quality of the people I meet during my visits constitutes for me a very dear community of individuals that share with me their lives, thoughts, food and time,” she added. “Our discussions and encounters are contemporary and make my life a richer place.
“I started coming in the first eight years in the winter, staying on Downes Point … the owners stayed there in the summer. I fell in love with the colors, the silver and grey, the fervor of the winds and the waters versus stillness. I liked also the emptiness and the contact with the local people that had much more time in the winter than in the busy summer.”
Later, Shalev-Gerz spent time on Cortes Island. Through her friendships on the Gulf Islands, she met many members of the local artistic community, among them Annette Hurtig, a curator from the KAG. Hurtig was the one who initiated the KAG show, but unfortunately was unable to complete it: she died of cancer. Her colleague, Charo Neville, finished the task, and is responsible for bringing the renowned artist’s works to Vancouver.
The Belkin show consists of videos and photographic installations. It starts with the video “Perpetuum Mobile.” Naomi Sawada, manager of public programs at the Belkin, explained that the artist created this installation a year before the euro was introduced in Europe.
On the screen, a huge 10-franc coin spins endlessly. “The coin never stills. It reflects people’s uncertainties and fears at the time,” Sawada explained. “Not everyone wanted a common currency. Questions abounded. Would common money mean losing national identity? How much does our money define us? Does money symbolize cultural values? It was a crisis then, but it continues now. It was a moment in history over a decade ago, but history is not one moment – it’s a process. It’s not linear and it’s never resolved.”
Sawada’s explanation about another item of the exhibition underlined the same concepts: national identity and personal identity. The idea for the installation “WHITE-OUT: Between Telling and Listening” originally appeared in the artist’s imagination when she first worked in Sweden. She learned that the Sami, an indigenous people of northern Europe whose traditional territory spans across four countries – Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia – don’t have a word for “war” in their language. Sweden itself hasn’t been at war for at least 200 years.
Intrigued, Shalev-Gerz set out to investigate what else united the two nations, the Swedes and the Sami. The result comprises two video screens facing each other. Both feature the Sami performer Asa Simma. On one screen, Simma talks about her personal history and its roots in her Sami identity. On the other screen, about two metres removed from the first, she listens to her own words. The viewer stands in between, watching both screens, literally “between telling and listening.”
In the first video, Simma talks about her dual identity as a Sami and a Swede. Her urban home is in Stockholm but, she said, “I’m a Sami wherever I am in the world, and it has nothing to do with my passport.” On the other hand, she admits, “I feel like the gift of coming from another culture and still being part of majority society gives me the ability to participate in both cultures fully.”
The history of the Sami recounted by Simma, first their rejection and later their recognition by the mainstream Swedish society, mirrors the history of aboriginal culture in Canada, and thus makes this installation doubly relevant to local viewers.
The theme of identity is both specific and universal. “National identity is a sum of many things, cultural and geographical,” said Sawada, pointing at the screens with the Sami performer. “It’s about all of us. What is Canadian? It has to do with the other people’s perception of us as much as with what we feel. We shouldn’t pigeonhole people. For example, I was born in Canada. My father was born in Canada. I’m Canadian but I’m Japanese too, and when people see my face, they think only Japanese. But I don’t want to be hyphenated.”
The uncanny parallels with Jewish culture in the Diaspora also strike symbolic resonance. Many Jews belong to two cultures at once: Jewish and Canadian, Jewish and Israeli, etc. Many also have a third streak of identity, the country in which they were born. What does it mean to embody multiple cultural identities, intertwined through history? Shalev-Gerz’s work invites viewers to consider these themes and to make their own discoveries.
Shalev-Gerz said that she has been fascinated with such themes from her very beginning as an artist. “I think every work of art is about the memory of something: a person, a situation, an event. I think it is the present that allows and invites thoughts, ideas, souvenirs, images, sounds and smells to come to the present and enlarge what we call memory or history. I don’t think those themes are fixed,” she said. “I perceive them as changeable realities, incorporating and inserting elements that were not counted and recounted before. I find the changeability of what we call memory as the most important for art, or as art itself. If we visit museums, most of the works there are about memory, displacement, identity – because those are the themes of our time.”
Her artistic path and her personal associations – she grew up in Israel – led to another significant video installation of interest to Jews around the world: “Between Listening and Telling: Last Witnesses, Auschwitz.” Also on display at the Belkin Gallery, the installation consists of three screens set side by side in a darkened room. This video is a part of the larger work she created for the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau: a series of filmed interviews with 60 survivors living in Paris. The recorded interviews themselves are housed at the Shoah Memorial in Paris.
On the three-channel projections at the Belkin, viewers can only see the survivors’ faces, some smiling, some grim, rotating on the three screens. There are no words, just elderly people; their expressions naked with emotion. What should they say? What should they leave behind? Their contemplative faces, “between listening and telling,” attract viewers, and the silence in the darkened room stirs imaginations. What were their lives like before, during and after the horrors of the Shoah? Viewers listen to the silence and see it reflected, in essence, around the world, in different countries and cultures.
Whatever Shalev-Gerz touches is international in scope. “I think, today, ‘international’ is something practised by so many people, including artists,” she told the Independent. “My students come from different countries or have parents from different cultures. This is the time where it is not so clear, when one has to find new words and definitions and maybe drop some. I think that’s what is so interesting in Canada: its people, their origins, their destinies and their convictions. I find myself very lucky to be able to move in this world as a woman artist who can practise, show and be listened to in many different places, and be inspiring or cause questioning. I am very happy when my work doesn’t leave you indifferent.”
For Shalev-Gerz, public participation in her work is paramount. “I like forms of dialogue and people that want to participate,” she said. The posters and videos of the public-space works included in the exhibition demonstrate her credo of collaboration with the viewer. “Let’s discuss the issue,” her art seems to say, and viewers hopefully respond by thinking and by acting.
The proof of this approach is the famous Monument Against Fascism by Shalev-Gerz and her former partner, Jochen Gerz, installed in Harburg, Germany, in 1986. At the time of installation, it was a 12-metre-square column, coated in lead and placed near a shopping centre. Beside it, a plaque in seven languages read: “We invite the citizens of Harburg and visitors to the town to add their names here next to ours. In doing so, we commit ourselves to remain vigilant. As more and more names cover this 12-metre-tall lead column, it will gradually be lowered into the ground. One day it will have disappeared completely, and the site of the Harburg Monument Against Fascism will be empty. In the end, it is only we ourselves who can stand up against injustice.”
Seven years and 70,000 signatures later, all that remains visible at the site is the text panel and the top of the column, now level with the ground. Each one of the 70,000 citizens who signed the column participated in this memorial, participated in creating history.
The exhibit at the Belkin Gallery is on until April 14.
Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].
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