Huge moving images are projected onto the white mass of screens hanging from the walls and the tall ceilings; you feel engulfed by the videos covering all surfaces. The showing at Tisch Gallery this season offers the Tufts community something completely different than its usual exhibits: An eye-opening and full-body experience that stirs the senses in new directions.
The exhibition, "Cross-Currents in Recent Video Installation: Water as Metaphor for Identity," is a media exhibition featuring the works of African artists IngridMwangiRobertHutter, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Moataz Nasr and Berni Searle. The artists' projects are all in the form of video, each portraying separate ideas with one main theme: water, an element that drew the artists in and inspired them to create their art.
Amy Schlegel, Director of the Galleries and Collections, explains, "The amorphous quality of water is explored as a metaphor for shifting notions of identity, migration, and memory."
And as Jeanne Koles, the Gallery Outreach Coordinator, notes, it is also important to recognize that the four installation creators share a bond beyond the main "Cross-Currents" theme, as "all the artists have ties to Africa."
The first exhibit, "Down by The River" is by Ingrid Mwangi Robert Hutter, a collaboration between media artists Ingrid Mwangi and Robert Hutter, who live and work together. Mwangi, who grew up in Nairobi, Kenya, studied sculpture, painting, graphic design and new artistic media in Germany, according to her website.
Peter Probst, associate professor of art history at Tufts, said "Down by the River" represents "colonization, oppression, and militant rebellion," but what is really achieved is that the "installation transcends concrete spatial and historical references by depicting a state in which past and future crimes flow into each other." The artist herself brought the symbolic red soil used in "Down by the River" back from Kenya.
Berni Searle, another of the featured artists, hails from Cape Town, South Africa. Her exhibit, "About to Forget," marks the first time she is not using her own body in her installation, says Pamela Allara, associate professor of contemporary art at Brandeis University and co-curator with Probst. Instead, "Searle uses cut-paper surrogates" made from red crepe paper magnified by the projectors.
There surrogates make up three separate frames, and, as Koles said, "They are perfectly synched to flow into one another."
The effect is incredible: the red paper figures slowly melt away and disperse into the water, which then flows from one frame into the next, turning all three frames red. This visual melting is representative of, as Allara said, "ancestral, national and racial histories [that] gradually loosen, and the metaphorical 'blood' binding the group disperses and dissolves." The soothing sound of water trickles and splashes to add to the effect.
Zwelethu Mthethwa, a compatriot of Searle's and the third "Cross-Currents" artist, also resides in Cape Town. "Crossings," his installation, is a film about three people's journey and the process of their baptismal right in the Zionist Church.
The three separate videos in Mthethwa's exhibition are filmed from various angles, creating a unique situation for viewers; it is intriguing to be able to focus on all three videos and also be aware of the differences and similarities between the individuals' journeys as they experience the spiritual transformation that is one of the main tenets of Zionism. Mthethwa allows the viewer to feel very much a part of the entire situation.
The final "Cross-Currents" installation is that of "painter, video and installation artist" Moataz Nasr, who comes to Tufts from Cairo, Egypt. Nasr's "Water" is one of the most aesthetically exciting installations in this exhibition, incorporating a pool of - what else? - water that reflects the video playing on the screen hanging over it.
"The video is a subtle visual reflection on the relationship between individual supremacy, state control and identity," Probst said. He believes that Nasr is questioning the identity of society through his work.
As Schlegal noted, the use of water as a theme helps to communicate ideas "of fluidity and instability, of violence, traumatic loss of life, and of spiritual rebirth" across all four installations. This theme also helps to represent the merging and filtering of cultures into one another.
These installations give the audience much to take in and absorb, yet it is not overwhelming. "Cross-Currents" is an exhibition that is both stimulating and informative; viewers will leave with many new questions.
Ingrid Mwangi will be giving a talk along with associate English professor Christina Sharpe today at 5 p.m. in the Remis Sculpture Court in Aidekman.
