Ana Rodić investigates the contemporary nomadic condition in physical spaces and their movement to the digital sphere
After Berlin, London, Rome and Venice, on Saturday 30th November the trunk will be hosted in Belgrade at Remont Gallery at 5.00pm, after having being carried along the planned route from the main Railway Station to the gallery.
Is it possible to call yourself a city nomad just by living in your own city? Or do you have to move or wait for those who are moving to refresh and update you?
Using these questions as a starting point, Belgrade-based artist Ana Rodić investigated the contemporary nomadic conditions in physical spaces and their movement to the digital sphere. Wearing a custom-designed dress and bespoke Wi-Fi necklace, Ana gathered her ‘nomadic tribe’ by becoming a mobile source of free Wi-Fi and a FOURSQUARE checkpoint. She allowed worldwide communications to move through her personal space and become a focus point for passersby, while crossing spaces of physical significance for people that live in Belgrade, such as the Zeleni Venac Market. Her research on offline/online meaning of relationships and community ended with her performance as a totemic internet hub at Remont Gallery.
MOVE W I T H (OUT) is a travelling project, based on Something Human’s 2012 curated multidisciplinary exhibition W I T H (OUT) that brought together an interdisciplinary selection of artworks such as mixed media, photography, installation film, performance, talks and workshops, which questioned the notions of “home”. Addressing an increasingly unstable global economic landscape, and drawing upon polynational understandings of the living space, the exhibition explored the ambivalent relationships between the interior and the exterior that plays out over issues such as identity, borders and migration, belonging and longing, and the tensions of navigating between the different spheres.
To further this curatorial enquiry, MOVE W I T H (OUT) turned this scope upon itself by creating a portable version of the exhibition to bring the works as a temporary performative intervention to cities across the world. At each new destination city, theMOVE W I T H (OUT) trunk is carried along a planned route that moves from a central terminal to locations of socio-cultural significance, whereby the travelling exhibition is opened for short periods. Upon reaching the host gallery/art space, the exhibition trunk is displayed and a live work is performed by a local artist in response to the ‘physical’ artworks, allowing these pieces to become part of unique local-based actions that would in turn transform the trunk into an active catalyst of local political/social and artistic issues. Thereupon a work by a local artist is placed in the trunk to be taken on route, and a work from the trunk is placed in the host space. This exchange of works not only symbolizes the cross-cultural transaction but also follows the narrative of the travelling/migrating, where objects are taken up and left behind continuously.
ARTIST IN THE TRUNK: John Clang, Caroline Christie and Bobby Lloyd, Mauro De Giorgi, Nina Feldman, Valerie Grove, Amanda Gutierrez, Howard Hardiman, Gloria Houng, The Huddle, Jakrawal Nilthamrong, Bill Psarras, Carlo Michele Schirinzi, Ines Von Bonhorst, Jason Wee.
Follow the trunk at:
http://movewithout.wordpress.com
http://something-human.org
