Hiding in Plain Sight: José Ferreira + Asma Kazmi
September 10, 2018 - September 28, 2018
Mānoa Campus, Commons Gallery, Dept. of Art + Art History
This exhibition project explores the exigencies of societal change that synchronously valorize technology over labor. The artists explore the demands of labor placed on us, as the demands of civic and social alienation threaten to overwhelm us. The project speaks about the building of borders—material and symbolic—giving rise to social exclusion and limiting the expression of local cultures. Jose Ferreira and Asma Kazmi both utilize different disciplines, processes, materials, ways of knowing, and experiencing, to make their work.
In Ferreira’s work he explores the demands of production—a relentless post-industrial labor effort that exacerbates the lack of sleep, accompanied by deep anxiety, which has become endemic to survival. He critically scrutinizes the way government, corporations and the military have focused their energies on developing a way to minimize the necessity for sleep, as part of an endless drive of production, without compromising efficiency, and the implications of these concepts for society at large. This installation distills some objects, photographs and texts to create a dystopian a landscape, a place where people can function, but are not heard.
For Kazmi, Cranes and Cube maps the radically changing sites and topographies of the urban landscape. The project surveys the political force fields of idealism and grandeur of the real estate boom in many cities, which is in dialogue with the tides of reconfiguration of historic structures and old neighborhoods. Thinking of the city as a palimpsest, Cranes and Cube is concerned with reading simultaneous strata of changes to the environment to make visible aspects of architecture that subsume and ambiguate each other. Using multiple media, this artwork reproduces construction sites, over-the-top building technologies, as well as ostentatious architectural forms to identify a middle-class/upper-middle-class desire to perpetuate de-historicized building vocabularies tied to a global rather than a local turn in architectural design.
SPECIAL EVENTS (all events are free and open to the public)
Monday, September 10
3:00 – 4:00 p.m. Gallery walk-through
4:00 – 5:00 Reception
Event Sponsor
Art + Art History, Mānoa Campus
More Information
Sharon Tasaka, (808) 956-8364, gallery@hawaii.edu, http://www.hawaii.edu/art/exhibitions+events/exhibitions/?p=3930
