Jan. 18, 2012 - Issue #848: City of champions

Of hurricanes and pollination

Latitude 53's first exhibits of the year probe the framing of issues both large and small

Until Sat, Feb 11
Striking a Pose
Works by Emanuel Licha, curated by Marie-Hélène Leblanc

Pollination Proposition
Works by Nicole Rayburn
Latitude 53
 

Latitude 53's first exhibits of the year thematically relate in their respective interrogations of disasters: one investigates tourism in sites of terrible destruction, while the other relates to the dramatic decline in honeybee population. That is where the similarities end.

In the main space, Striking a Pose by Emanuel Licha and curated by Marie-Hélène Leblanc, video works explore bearing witness to sites of tragedy through tourism and journalism. "War Tourist" features a series of five televisions, each showing a video charting a tour of New Orleans, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Parisian suburbs, Chernobyl, and Sarajevo, respectively. Each film creates space for a quiet consideration of what it means to travel to sites of atrocities. The guide to post-Katrina New Orleans speaks to the camera as he describes how control of the city was regained, and illustrates how many homes fell victim to flooding from the military-built levee rather than the hurricane. As this information is digested, the critical distance from the other side of the television allows for learning as if one is watching a documentary film, while also imagining their location as tourist. How much is travel to an atrocity site exploitative, allowing for the thrill and horror of the event from the event to be experienced without the risk faced by the victims? How much of this is important learning, bearing witness, and paying tribute to those who suffered?

In "How Do We Know What We Know?" Licha does a brilliant job of opening up questions about journalism of such horrors through coverage of the recent political unrest in Syria. His film reveals the production behind a "real" live conflict, jumping between American news footage and video that records its production from the otherwise hidden windy hillside in Turkey. As the American production team leaves, a member of the local camera team asks a telling question: "How will it be when they're gone?" Licha punctuates this question by showing how journalism makes an event real, alluding to the invisibility of stories that aren't told in front of the camera. The question the film raises about the production of such knowledge, and the stories untold about the impact of video journalism on communities that find themselves inundated by these international visitors, will keep you wondering what is happening beyond the frame the next time you turn on the news.
 

The video in the ProjEx Room, "Pollination Proposition" by Nicole Rayburn, is unfortunately much less provocative. There is no doubt that there are critical ideas to be explored in the alarming deaths of honeybees, these creatures' fundamental importance to our sources of sustenance, and the insect/human/industry power dynamic that results. However, I am not convinced that a woman in a prosthetic nose probing white and purple flowers with the end of it aids a beneficial investigation of these issues. This act comes across as an attempt at humour through this very phallic gesture, which apparently is meant to pose an alternative to bee pollination. The sanitary white space and use of decorative flowers connote pollination, yes, but fail to purposefully relate to the bigger picture of bees as critical to global food production, as argued in the artwork description. vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus