Ferhat Özgür and Anna Witt
Ferhat Özgür
Let Everybody Come Out Today
February 9–April 7, 2013
Anna Witt
Manifesto
March 21–June 30, 2013
Marabouparken
Löfströmsvägen 8
Sundbyberg
Ferhat Özgür
Let Everybody Come Out Today
February 9–April 7, 2013
In 2002 Turkish artist Ferhat Özgür asked the neighbours in the street where he grew up to pose for a group photo. Having moved from the countryside to Ankara, they had built their homes on the outskirts of the city. Now, their part of town was due for bulldozing. In the diptych Let Everybody Come Out Today the neighbours stare grimly at the camera, marked by life. It is a key work in Özgür’s oeuvre; for years he has been critically following the changes taking place in Ankara where informal settlements are torn down and replaced by a growing number of skyscrapers and shopping malls.
Without falling into nostalgia, Özgür portrays in a series of photographs and video works, the challenges facing the individual in a country where the lines between Islam and Christianity, Turkish traditions and Western influences are constantly renegotiated.
The videos Metamorphosis Chat (2010) and the more recent Women in Love (2013) both cite the narrative frame of Turkish soap operas. The actors in Özgür’s films are often acquaintances and relatives. Together they seek images and gestures to visually express the difficulties facing women living in a patriarchal society and in a present that is constantly producing new realities and questioning traditional ideas about what constitutes a successful life.
In Women in Love (2013) a group of widows reminisce about their lives with their husbands. The conversation moves from painful descriptions of domestic violence, alcohol abuse and the women’s vulnerability and isolation as child brides, to absurd anecdotes and laughter. These women are testimony to a life lived seen through the transformation of the city and society as a whole.
Anna Witt
Manifesto
March 21–June 30, 2013
German artist Anna Witt (b. 1981) creates playfully staged interventions where people are invited to express their ideas about society.
Thinking as an action in itself is a recurring concern in Anna Witt’s work. For Radical Thinking (2009) the artist spent two weeks in a shopping mall in Vienna asking people to develop radical thoughts and then made a film portrait of them while they were thinking. In this and in other works the artist investigates ideas about who can be political and what the political means in every day life. In Empower Me (2007) the artist “kidnapped” random passersby in the street and brought them into the exhibition space. Once in the room they were given the opportunity to define the demands for their release and to perform as hostages in a film. In different ways Anna Witt attempts to provoke confrontation between oneself and the world around, either through body language, text or images. In The Eyewitness (2012) a group of children ages 8–10 discuss the current news of the world in front of blown-up images from the Reuters press archive. The children’s discussions reflect the grown-up world with their mix of facts, misunderstandings, acquired opinions and their own ideas, and allow us to take a closer look at how we really handle these kinds of images.
In addition to these video installations, Anna Witt is producing a new work that will be added to the exhibition. Conversations carried out with people in Hallonbergen about their living conditions, larger political contexts and ideas about the future have been formulated into a manifesto. The Everything Will Happen-Parade is a public performance where participants will be holding sculptural letters. As they move through Hallonbergen, sentences are formed and unformed, so that the manifesto will be legible only at certain moments.
The Parade is commissioned by Marabouparken Lab: local, collaborative projects that are experimental, and open-ended.
