THE ACCIDENTAL PURSUIT OF THE STATELESS II
▷ Gaia Gallery // Istanbul, Turkey / January 21 to March 5 - 2016
Exhibition link: gaiagallery.com/the-accidental-pursuit-of-the-stateless-ii
Body Of Work: The Accidental Pursuit Of The Stateless
Exhibited:
▷ UP Gallery - Berlin, Germany // November 27, 2015 - January 12, 2016 / Exibition link: upgalleryberlin.com/stories-from-the-end
▷ Moving Image - Istanbul, Turkey // September 4 - 6 2015 / Exibition link:artsy.net/moving-image-istanbul-2015
▷ BravinLee Programs - New York City // September 10 to October 17 2015
The Accidental Pursuit of the Stateless talks about migration, mobility, transculturality, and a sense of place. The discourse is informed by the current experience of migrant women and the ongoing refugee crisis.
Elektra KB’s body of work is of a performative nature in the thread of the post-colonial discourse and uses the platform of the personal mythology: The Theocratic Republic of Gaia, an Utopian-Dystopian world.
The works on this show come as the result of a yearlong fellowship in Berlin. During this time, KB pursued traveling to what she perceived as a mutant city, where east meets west driven by the interest of unpacking her own conflicted feelings of sense of place of an Odessa born Latin-American living in New York and her interest in the issue of migration. She researched the experiences of migrant women from post-colonial societies focusing specifically on Latin-America, in the context of a city that is a post-soviet hybrid. KB undertook the task of interviewing several women who left their countries due to a variety of reasons from: existential, economical, and psychological to political persecution and created works as a result of this research. Each work is inspired and/or performed based on an individual story, or a collective story. KB uses textile, photography and video as her main mediums.
The homonymous film The Accidental Pursuit of the Stateless entails KB’s performances based on several real life experiences from a fellow Colombian migrant. A political refugee that emigrated to Germany during the post Berlin wall turmoil in the 90’s, which the artist worked together with and became a close friend. The first part of the film introduces the viewer to the Theocratic Republic of Gaia, which plays with critical humor and the aesthetics of colonial art tropes and the insurgent struggle she grew up with (The Papess, the veiled women, the guerrilla fighter), using pre-Hispanic imagery and the cross –an autobiographical nod to her upbringing in a rural hospital in Colombia–. The T.R.O.G is a parallel universe fighting between the tensions built on a totalitarian state and the revolutionary Cathara Insurgency, situating itself close to the political sci-fi genre.
