Land of Resistance, Digital Prints, Found Objects, and Print Media, 2015, 5'x2'x4'
Brett Ginsburg (KC)
Brett Ginsburg
Brett Ginsburg (b. 1990 Kansas City, Kansas) is a visual artist currently living and working in Kansas City, Missouri. His practice considers material, metaphor, and location through image and object. He is also a co-founder of Arena, a creative and curatorial group operating through various outlets to materialize unrealized projects.
For more information about Brett and their work, please visit brettginsburg.com
1. Forum: Aesthetica of Crisis, Sven Luttickent + Raqs Media Collective
As part of the lecture series Aesthetics of Crisis, The Raqs Media Collective and Sven Lütticken will discuss the topic of “time” in relation to the 2008 global financial crisis and its aftermath. See more at: www.stedelijk.nl/en/calendar/forum/time-the-raqs-media-collective-and-sven-luetticken
2. Didactic for Land of Resistence
Photographs fixate on formal devices such as repetitious forms, image clipping, and reflections to foreground intersections between natural spaces and synthetic elements. Resistant forms, like retaining fences, puncture the profuse Israeli-Palestinian landscape. Colors operate reflexively of their automated or natural forming.
Objects engage with theoretical and material-based symbols for political and geological resistance within the region. Silicate samples taken directly from the landscape act as a regionally-bound material to represent an open-ended metaphor for Israel-Palestine as the land of resistance to create a mold from. This substrate (the mold) yields form through physical restraint and is bound to seismic data from The Great Syria-African rift. Binding the mold to the data renders a dualistic object to consider the region's conflicted political condition and tectonic activity as the land physically grinds against itself beneath the Earth's surface. Zizek employed Lacan's symptomal knot as a possible diagnosis for the Middle Eastern crisis. The knot interlocks a trio of möbius bands to demonstrate the ongoing play between the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary. The space for the ego is held by copper hardware, serving as a material-based conductor for an omnipresent sense of nationalism within the region. Fissures, cracks, and rifts within images and objects are held together by hardware to wed varying components to one another.
Influential texts and appropriated imagery are directly incorporated into this vignette to communicate specific points of reference. For instance, Joshua Simon’s book, Solution 196-213: United States of Palestine-Israel, serves as a surrogate for our meeting and wide-spread conversation while in Tel Aviv. A defaced cosmetic window advertisement from the surrounding area re-solicits itself atop the exterior of the vitrine. Captured video stills from Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville’s political polemic film, Here and Elsewhere, interface with moiré patterns from screen-based viewing.