Vanessa Sun
MOMA Response
The two pieces I was drawn to instantly were Bouchra Khalili’s The Mapping Journey Project and Teiji Furuhashi’s Lovers. Despite not being paintings, I felt I could describe both these pieces equally as well as if I were to describe paintings. They were just two pieces that captured my fascination so quickly and intensely, as they were both uniquely built exhibitions.
I could easily tell that the digital aspects of the pieces were what I wanted to focus on. I feel that the digitalizing of the pieces changed the way light was used in them. In The Mapping Journey Project, there was a relatively dark room and the light was bright from the hanging screens. I wondered if it had specific meaning to the piece, this obvious contrast with darkness and light. The bright screens could have represented the refugees’ hope, whether or not they had found it in the various places they went to on their journeys. In the dark room, the dark world that had surrounded them, they could have found goodness in another place, or attempted to find some place better than the place they fled from. Whatever it meant, I felt that light played an important role in the piece, especially in the way that it was a digital presentation in a dark room. Similar was Lover, which also included a dark room and a projection. This one had a different feeling in its use of light, though. I felt the room was intentionally dark to contrast the figures projected around the room, which were not particularly bright either. There was a bigger sense of blending into the darkness that the figures were showing. There is a serenity to the scene that is not found in The Mapping Journey Project because of the way the figures blended into the darkness.
I think both pieces, The Mapping Journey Project and Lovers would not have been the same if not presented in the media and with the same light shown as in their actual exhibitions, which says a lot about the meaning of the pieces. Instead of using painting or photography or another art form for the refugee project, there was something more personal in the projections of the refugee’s mapped journeys. There was a different sense of attention that each screen gained by being so bright in a dark room. In Lovers, the way the exhibition is set up is also important. The isolation in which the project is hosted and the darkness required for the piece is an essential part to the experience.
The visual interactions of both The Mapping Journey and Lovers include an emphasis on direction. In the case of The Mapping Journey, the direction is found in the movement that the people explain in their stories. There is a sense of, well, journey, which highlights the literal meaning of the piece. The viewer feels the direction of “moving forward” in the pieces, or just movement, as the refugees tell their stories of moving from place to place. Direction is also a critical part to Lovers. The figures move in all sorts of directions, causing a little bit of confusion for the audience, but also adding to the piece’s meaning. Perhaps that shows how love is, moving, changing, transforming, fluid. Both pieces have a geometric form, with clear shapes and patterns. Positioning also plays a part in the visual interactions of the pieces. In The Mapping Journey Project, the positioning of the screens do not play as big a role into the meaning of the work as in Lovers. However, they probably do have some importance- perhaps one story is highlighted as it is in front of the others and there does seem to be a specific arrangement to the screens in the room. In the piece, Lovers, though, it is obvious that the spatial distance between the elements create tension and focus. When the figures cross, there must be some meaning behind this. It is very different from the screens never touching on The Mapping Journey Project.
