Any college student can relate to feelings of displacement--leaving home, entering a new environment and eventually calling that new place home. Three new installations at the Center for Documentary Studies tackle the obstacles of geographical and emotional displacement, but of much more extreme and life-altering kinds. Through photography, spatial art, collage and spoken and written word, the artists express what it is like to enter vastly different worlds with different languages, cultures and customs.
The main exhibit is Turkish-born artist and photographer Tuba ...ztekin's "Inside|Outside," in which photographs of her family and friends from Turkey are projected onto white sheets hanging from the gallery's ceiling, as ...ztekin's recorded voice whispers memories in Turkish. Like ...ztekin's experience of moving to America, the multi-sensory images are at first disenchanting and alienating, but gradually seize hold of the observer.
...ztekin's installation becomes even more powerful when viewed with the two accompanying exhibitions. In "Ni de Aqui/Ni de Alla, Not from Here/Not from There," students in Randolph County, N.C., who emigrated from Mexico share their feelings about entering a new, unfamiliar and often unwelcoming world in the United States through collage, prose and poetry. Deeply personal and honest, the pictures and words of the youth capture the incredible hardship of physical and cultural transplantation.
Together, these multi-media, multi-perspective installations facilitate a deep and thorough understanding of the difficulties of crossing borders and barriers of any kind.
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