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Homes and gardens: documenting the invisible, and The Guide

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posted on 2023-06-08, 07:12 authored by Melanie Friend

Exhibition: Homes and Gardens Documenting the Invisible: Images of Kosovo & installation piece "The Guide". Staged at the Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg Sweden (16 June - 24 August 2001); co-exhibitor, Roger Ballen, curator Val Williams. Together with : Portfolio of work from Kosovo, introduced by Anthony Georgieffe in Katalog: Journal of Photography and Video (Danish/English, published Denmark, Summer 2002)

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Curator: Val Williams

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Event name

Homes and gardens: documenting the invisible

Event location

Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg, Sweden.

Event date

16 June - 24 August 2001.

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Media and Film Publications

Notes

This 2001 exhibition at the Hasselblad Center comprised two related pieces. Homes and Gardens: Documenting the Invisible focused on the 'hidden' human rights abuses perpetrated in Kosovo by the Milosevic regime during the decade leading up to conflict in 1998-99. This exhibition/installation used a soundtrack of voiced testimonies, mostly in Albanian, juxtaposed with images of peaceful, domestic interiors and gardens where violent abuse by security forces had occurred, exploring the incongruity between place and event. Material from Homes and Gardens was originally exhibited in 1996, but was re-curated in a substantially different form for this exhibition. The second piece, The Guide, also about Kosovo, was shown here for the first time in a public gallery and explored the traumatic after-effects of the 1999 massacre at Recak on one particular survivor, juxtaposing a huge projected slide of a Mediterranean hillside path (the site of the massacre) with a 17 minute cyclical soundtrack. Using visual understatement, both works challenged the limitations of documentary photography, and through the use of intimate voiced testimonies disrupted the apathy and objectification that frequently accompanies traditional photojournalism. The Guide was not documented in situ at the Center owing to being in a darkened space. Written confirmation from the Hasselblad Center that The Guide was exhibited in 2001 is available. The material for both pieces, including sound and images, is presented on CD. A newsletter published by the Hasselblad Center, including information about the exhibition, is included in the Portfolio. Excerpts from Homes and Gardens were presented at the international conference Interior Insights, Royal College of Art, 24/25 November 2005. Homes and Gardens has been the subject of academic study: eg. Wendy Kozol's `Domesticating NATO's War in Kosovo: Invisible Bodies and the Dilemma of Photojournalism in Meridians: Feminism, Transnationalism and Race (Vol. 4, no. 2004). Also see Portfolio

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Legacy Posted Date

2012-02-06

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