Fluchtpunkt Wien – Symbolisations of Loss, Curators' Talk
12 July 2019, at 7 p.m., VBKÖ - Austrian Association of Women Artists, Vienna. How can the existential experience of flight and expulsion be documented? Which forms and strategies of visualisation can be found, when letting loose and a reduction to the essential - the survival - is a central constituent of this story? A notepad, a photo in an album and a letter point to the flight histories of three women, who in the course of Yugoslavia's disintegration in early 1990ties' war found a resort in Vienna. On their flight, the three of them could hardly carry anything of their personal belongings and were only able to get back a fraction after the war.
Vida Bakondy and Amila Širbegović
Fluchtpunkt Wien – Symbolizations of Loss
Curators' Talk
Friday, 12 July 2019, 7 p.m.
VBKÖ - Austrian Association of Women Artists
A - 1010 Vienna, Maysedergasse 2/28
"There are two kinds of refugees: those with photos and those without photos", said a refugee from Bosnia. from: The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, Dubravka Ugrešić, 1998
How can the existential experience of flight and expulsion be documented? Which forms and strategies of visualisation can be found, when letting loose and a reduction to the essential - the survival - is a central constituent of this story? A notepad, a photo in an album and a letter point to the flight histories of three women, who in the course of Yugoslavia's disintegration in early 1990ties' war found the resort in Vienna. On their flight, the three of them could hardly carry anything of their personal belongings and were only able to get back a fraction after the war.
The shown objects open up the gaze on various dimensions of loss and the related biographical rupture lines, that come along with the existence as a refugee: of humans, home, belonging and remembrance, of personal property, social status, and citizen rights. They tell both of the precarity of life and the meaning of and right for recollection. Insofar, they are a witness of continuity and discontinuity: by being the anchor point of remembrance and in the same amount, evidence of absence and loss.
In the frame of the exhibition "Translocal Archives" 29 June 2019– 14 July 2019, Thu – Sun from 2 – 7 p.m.