Recently, I went to a gallery talk by Yael Kanarek at Exit Art in New York. She presented her work World of Awe. The event was billed as follows.
During the artist’s talk, Yael will guide the audience through several scenes, point to memes born in the Middle East and Mediterranean that are present in contemporary culture, and describe how three geographies—-physical, virtual, and fictional—-overlap in this project.
For the panel, Yael invited colleagues to consider how the Internet enables the emergence of a post-national identity alongside burgeoning nationalism and the strengthening of nation-states by globalization.
This isn't a new topic, but is is one that is always interesting to those of us who are involved in internet community and who have experienced the ways that one's communities of interest, strengthened by the power of the internet to bring people together, interplay with nationality, gender, geography, or other pieces of ones identity.
Yael's work is interesting in a lot of ways. She was born in the US but grew up in Israel. She speaks several languages and approaches the question of identity from all the angles at once. Even the servers containing the work are placed strategically throughout the Middle East and in New York.
In Object of Desire, my favorite was the felafel angle. Inside the imaginary landscape of the art work, there emerges a rough map of part of Manhattan. As you click through, the map shows street names, then the artist's home, then felafel restaurants in her neighborhood, represented by giant felafel balls. The felafel restaurants' names are then replaced with their nationalities, and all of these delicious felafels are swallowed by the vortex of the artist's center.
Origins matter to people. For most of us, the question, "Where are you from?" feels meaningful. Even those who've spent their lives traveling or who have nebulous connections to their official nationalities usually have some kind of an answer to this question. Those who don't are the exceptions that prove the rule.
Even though definitions and identities are shifting and evolving, it still feels far off for us to imagine a world where nationality, ethnicity, or tribalism do not sit somewhere near the core of who we think we are. The ideal may not in the end be to live in a world where one's national identity is muted or lost, but to live in a world where that identity isn't equated with ugly nationalism. Where the feeling of belonging to a group based on geography, borders, tradition, and so on is one just one of the many layers in our identity and is woven in with enough other pieces and threads that connectedness to others who don't share it becomes simpler.
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