It gives me great pleasure to announce that from October 15-November 6, 2011, the Queens Museum of Art will be hosting the Artefacting Team’s exhibition IMMERSION in our Partnership Gallery. The multimedia installation showcases their three-month long artistic explorations in Dharavi, Mumbai.
In addition the Artefacting team will also be doing a presentation on their recent three-month residency in Detroit on October 22nd, 4-6pm. Moreover, they are bringing their unique collaborative process to the auto-workers at nearby Willets Point for a weekend-long public festival that takes visitors on a one-of-a-kind tour of artistic interventions in the “Iron Triangle.” Please find details on this exciting set of activities and exchanges in the attached press release.
We look forward to hopefully welcoming you to the Opening Reception on Sunday, October 16th with a screening and discussion from 1-3pm in our theater, followed by Opening Remarks and Refreshments from 3-5pm.
OVERVIEW
Artefacting will be exhibiting work from its Mumbai and Detroit missions from October 16th till November 6,2011 at the Queens Museum of Art, Queens NY, USA
“Artefacting Mumbai”, a three-month social immersion into Dharavi Mumbai, Asia’s largest slum, comes to the Queens Museum of Art. Photography, paintings, video, sculpture and sound exhibit the artistic and social work of an international art collective comprised of NYC based visual artist/urbanist Alex White Mazzarella, Portland based videographer Casey Nolan, Dutch photographer Arne de Knegt, and Bombay filmmakers Nishant Nayak and Parasher Baruah.
“Immersion” provides the viewer with a multi-media entry point into the “other side”; a Dharavi filled with positivity, tolerance and diverse identity.
Well documented and retold, is an art & community festival in Dharavi that brought in more than 500 outsiders into this “slum” to experience and interact with the residents and their homes. Testimony of visitors reveal them as they challenge their very own fears and negative stereotypes and locals as they explain how they worked with the Artefacting team, and what this invasion of outsiders meant to them.
This entire experience and the very artwork on exhibition on that day, is reassembled and presented as “Immersion”: paintings that express the tolerance and gap between the insider and outsider… photographs depicting Dharavi workers as fashion models.
Another chapter presented are video interviews of the local team displaced due to a Dharavi demolition. On July 7th 2011, the Bombay Municipal Corporation sent seven bulldozers and 1,000 policemen and officials to Dharavi to demolish approximately 300 homes and businesses, displacing thousands of residents in the heart of the recycling community.
In all 20 paintings, four monitors presenting more than 20 video shorts & segments, a slew of photographs, eviction notices, plastic chips and a buzzing beehive sculpture “Immerse” the viewer in Artefacting Mumbai.
