Flickering Landscapes Conference - The Image of Migration: Landscapes and People
March 28-30, 2019
The Gallery at Center for Emerging Media: 500 Bentley St, Orlando, FL 32801
The public is invited to attend this conference and all events associated with it free of charge. The conference brings together scholars and filmmakers to address how moving images depict the relationship between human migration and place. Our definition of migration encompasses any movement of peoples, including migration within nations or across national boundaries. The variety of the spaces migrants move across demands that we define place in the broadest terms possible: land, and sea, and the built environment. For more details visit our website: flickeringlandsc.cah.ucf.edu/. Registration is free and is requested to help us plan for seating and refreshments.
Shifting Terrain: Images of Migration and Detention Gallery Opening
The Gallery at Center for Emerging Media: 500 Bentley St, Orlando, FL 32801
Thursday, March 28, 6:30-7:30 pm
The conference features an exhibition curated by UCF’s Keri Watson titled Shifting Terrain: Images of Migration and Detention, on view in the Center for Emerging Media March 28-30, and includes works by Dorita Hannah, Hiwa K, Jave Yoshimoto, and Vukasin Nedeljkovic that investigate themes including borders as geographical and symbolic dividing lines, displacement and asylum seeking, refugee camps and detention centers, and immigration and resettlement. Hiwa K is a Kurdistani musician and artist who combines photography, video, and installation to investigate notions of home, displacement, memory, and communication in a shifting political landscape. Jave Yoshimoto is a multimedia artist whose wooden relief sculptures, based on cell phone photographs and films taken on Lesvos Island, Greece in December 2016, investigate notions of translation, migration, and the refugee experience. Vukasin Nedeljkovic is a multidisciplinary artist whose project Asylum Archive was made in collaboration with asylum seekers, artists, academics, civil society activists, and immigration lawyers, while he was housed in a Direct Provision Centre in Ireland from April 2007 to November 2009.
Dorita Hannah’s PhoneHome was developed for Chile’s Architecture & Urbanism Biennial on ‘Unpostponable Dialogues,’ which invited architects, artists and activists to reflect on critical contemporary issues about the built environment. It engages architecture’s role in housing those without home and homeland. The intermedial installation critiques architecture’s complicity in detaining ‘alien’ bodies while recognizing the smartphone’s role in resisting such detention. Miniature refugee cabins house phones playing videos by artists and correspondents from Iran, Kurdistan, Russia, Greece, Australia, New Zealand and the UK, which are apprehended through mediating elements of the models’ barred windows and headphones. CURATORS/DESIGNERS: Dorita Hannah (NZ), Joanne Kinniburgh (Australia/NZ), Shauna Janssen (Canada)
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS / CORRESPONDENTS: Drone Footage of Homs: RT (Russia) Chauka, Tell Us The Time: Behrouz Boochani (Kurdistan/Iran) & A Sarvestani (Iran/Netherlands) Ayaz: Syrian Boy Sings Lament in Iraq Refugee Camp: Rescue4Children (Kurdistan/Iraq) Vigil: Tracey Moffatt (Australia/USA) Revolting: Lindsay Seers (UK) tea time EUROPE: Giorgos Zamboulakis and The Experimental Theatre of Thrace (Greece): Island Icarus (“you peeled our skin off”): D Hannah, Sean Coyle & Chris Jackson (NZ/Australia)
Jave Yoshimoto is an internally-exhibited and award-winning artist of multi-cultural background. Born in Japan to Chinese parents, he immigrated to United States at a young age and received his BA from the University of California Santa Barbara, his Post-baccalaureate Certificate in Painting and Drawing and MA in Art Therapy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and his MFA in Painting at Syracuse University. Currently, Yoshimoto is on the faculty at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. In this artist talk, Yoshimoto will discuss his experiences volunteering on Lesvos Island in Greece in December of 2016. As he says, "What I’ve discovered thus far is that the refugees are from all around the world, rather than only being from Syria as depicted in the media. I have also come to discover that the news coverage on the topic is often sensationalized, and even sometimes re-enacted for the sake of reporting. The stories of the local villagers and the volunteers seem often forgotten or ignored, and the refugees are used in narratives that sometimes are simply not true. More importantly, I wish to capture the humanitarian tale amongst this crisis, hoping that in turn, my viewers can be inspired to assist refugees or anyone who has suffered a great loss due to manmade or natural disasters."
Vukasin Nedeljkovic is a multidisciplinary artist whose project Asylum Archive was made in collaboration with asylum seekers, artists, academics, civil society activists, and immigration lawyers, while he was housed in a Direct Provision Centre in Ireland from April 2007 to November 2009. Vukasin Nedeljkovic holds a Masters in Visual Arts Practice at Dunlaoghaire Institute of Arts, Design and Technology. He is a PhD candidate at Dublin Institute of Technology. He exhibited both nationally and internationally.
Asylum Archive is a platform open for dialogue and discussion inclusive to individuals who have experienced a sense of sociological/geographical ‘displacement’, social trauma and violence. It is an act of solidarity to bring a different perspective on the life of people who came to Ireland to seek protection. Asylum Archive’s objective is to collaborate with asylum seekers, artists, academics and activists, amongst others, with a view to creating an interactive documentary cross-platform online resource, critically foregrounding accounts of exile, displacement, trauma and memory.
Hiwa K. To remember, sometimes you need other archaeological tools says the voice over in Hiwa K’s Pre-Image (Blind as the Mother Tongue). The video depicts the artist walking across fields, wastelands, estates, going from Turkey to Athens and then to Rome, a path that mirrors his own journey as a child, when he fled Iraqi Kurdistan and reached Europe by foot. His “Pre-images” are fragments of a path whose final destination is uncertain.
PRESENTED BY:
The Center for Humanities and Digital Research, The Nicholson School of Communications and Media, and the Texts and Technology Doctoral Program at the University of Central Florida
SPONSORED BY:
The Office of Research, The College of Graduate Studies, CREATE (Center for Research and Education in Arts, Technology and Entertainment), The Department of English, The Department of History, The College of Arts and Humanities, FIEA (Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy), The Center for Humanities and Digital Research, The Nicholson School of Communications and Media, The Puerto Rico Research Hub, and The Texts and Technology Doctoral Program at the University of Central Florida