Shift
Makhoul, Bashir (2017) Shift. [Installation]
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The title 'Shift' not only refers to the literal movement of the work and ideas of instability but to 'shifts' in scale, in which small houses are held by a giant sifting pan by water waves. The shift of scale is intended to explore the shifts in scale between the local and the global.
As a Palestinian in exile, for me this project explores ideas of displacement in the interactions between the local and the global. In particular the ways in which the immediate, physical and literal encounters with global forces happen at the local level. Our experiences in our workplaces, homes and our relationship to place and nature are in part determined by global political forces. This is felt most immediately at the coal-face of globalised capitalism, by the poorest workers, migrants and by those quite literally extracting value from the earth.
The project installation will draw from the specific economic, political and colonial history of Malaysia and aim to extract and process these elements into multivalent and condensed forms. The installation will confront the viewer with these elements in forms that push together conflicting images and associations, rather in the manner of Freud's theory of dreamwork - the elements and imagery acting as 'condensations' of residual, associative and unconscious content. In this we can see how art can explore global political forces operating at the psycho-social level. The 'local' here being inside the privacy of our own skulls.
The installation will consist of thousands of small model tin houses floating on the surface of a water pool. As the water waves move the tin houses shift and start to compete for space in the water. The most immediate association will be the early forms of manual tin ore extraction in the region, usually carried out by Chinese migrant labour. The houses evoke the tin shacks of shanty towns, usually built and inhabited by migrants and often made from corrugated tin. Migrants travelling on flimsy boats aiming for the unreachable safety of a stable country. The water and the shifting, wave movement brings to the surface the precariousness of life for migrants, as well as ideas of instability and flux in globalised capital. Water, in this context, is also a multivalent symbol - something on which all life depends and also something that threatens and endangers life through scarcity or catastrophic excess. In this we also have the evocation of the traumatic local effects of global warming.
Accompanying exhibition catalogue published by Balai Seni Negara / National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, ISBN: 9789670914138, Bashir Makhoul: pp. 170-171.
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