An indispensable series of conversations on the nature of art and community have been taking place around the country as part of a project at the Center for Community Change. Called Bridge Conversations, they are being posted on Community Arts Network.

One of the things we learned is that some of the most creative strategies live in the intersections of disciplines, sectors, cultures and generations. We also found that many of the most effective people we met were those who are building bridges and creating hybrid and integrated programs and strategies. This series of essays seeks to learn from a diverse group of these creative people who recognize and further deep connections between environment, education, community development, politics, social service, public health and anthropology, and art and culture. While we started out focusing primarily on people’s work, we soon found that the journey to a holistic perspective includes people’s personal lives– how they grow up, how they connect cultures and world views and how they balance their personal life and their work.

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Minidoka on My Mind, Roger Shimomura’s new exhibition, opens May 8th in New York City at Flomenhaft Gallery. His unparalleled insights into the conditions of life in Japanese internment camps during WW II stunningly blend humor and popular culture styling with an unmistakable– and unforgettable bite.

Fernetici / Fernetti, video still, 2008

Ljubljana has currently no major exhibition space for contemporary art, with the exception of important independent spaces such as Skuc Galerija and P74. Although both galleries have socially and politically relevant shows on display, Mala Galerija, the contemporary art affiliation of the momentarily closed Moderna Galerija, presents the most compelling one: Lost Territories.

Considering every European nation as having a larger territory in its memory, sometimes extending beyond its present day borders, artist Saso Sedlacek regards territory not only as an abstract notion. In our everyday life, it is in the first place a piece of real estate: the house or apartment in which we live.

Trieste and its surrounding area is a historically traumatic region for both Italy and Slovenia. Once a grand cosmopolitan Austro-Hungarian city, it lost its central European setting after the First World War and became gradually a declining Italian harbor town. Trieste was the window onto the world for many Slovenes and consequently it permanently marked Slovene culture. Being close to Ljubljana, the two cities grew apart over the years.

With Lost Territories, Saso Sedlacek proposes to bring the two cities back together, imagining that eliminating the border in people’s minds would be mutually beneficial. He provokingly states: “In Kosovo, Albanians bought overpriced real estate from the local Serbian population for several decades and consequently established an independent state. Real estate in Trieste, which is an hour’s drive away from Ljubljana, is at the moment cheaper than in Slovenia. Today there is no longer a need to create new countries or officially move the borders in Europe. As is evident in Kosovo, these can be moved simply from one apartment to another.”

The exhibition is based on research into specific aspects of the elimination of the border between Italy and Slovenia caused by the Slovenian inclusion in the EU in 2004. The artist designed a new flag that combines the respective flags of both countries and hung it for one day at the border between Italy and Slovenia.

Lost Territories displays this flag as well as a video that documents the action. Different available real estate in Trieste is on display while a computer allows the visitor to go online and actually buy the property. Dealing with environmental issues in the broadest sense of the word, Saso Sedlacek redefines common notions of Slovene national identity within global trends of technology, ecology and the ideological void after the transition period.

Here for Saso Sedlacek.

Pau D’Amato, ‘Bedroom Door’, 2007

In his thoughtful exhibition essay accompanying Black Is, Black Ain’t, curator Hamza Walker considers race as a biological fiction “that remains a social fact whose history more than compensates for all that science disavows.” Taking its title from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, it explores a shift in the rhetoric of race from an earlier emphasis on inclusion to a present moment where racial identity is being simultaneously rejected and retained. The exhibition brings together works by 26 black and non-black artists whose work together examines a moment where the cultural production of so-called “blackness” is concurrent with efforts to make race socially and politically irrelevant.

At the Renaissance Society in Chicago, until June 8.

Hungarian filmmaker Péter Forgács produced the first installment of his Private Hungary (Privát Magyarország) series roughly two decades ago.

In these films, he reconstructs personal family histories, predominantly through home movies and photographs (shot roughly between the 1930s and 1950s), presenting ordinary lives shattered by historic social and political upheavals of the 20^th century, which are significantly missing from these amateur visual records of private histories.

“Amateur films are human stories, which have more or less happened to everyone: we are born, we toddle, we bathe, we laugh, we celebrate, we’re surrounded by family. There are virtually no deaths, divorces, abuses, aggressions to be found in them. This is why, a home movie is essentially the representation of our pursuit of happiness. And happiness is nothing else than an attempt to flee death in all of its representations, all signs of perishability.” (Péter Forgács)

Here is a fragment of Forgács’ latest work, the 15th installment of Private History:

I am Von Höfler – Variation on Werther

here for Péter Forgács’ website

Here’s a thought-provoking article from Eurozine on the legacy and meaning of Nietzsche as it relates to contemporary society. Exploring his often offensive attitude towards morality and politics, his attacks on monotheistic religions and nationalism, his project of the revaluation of all values, and his critique of egalitarianism in relation to liberal democracy; six philosophers answer questions in relation to his views. Excessively sensitive, anti-liberal and irrelevant, or radical, prescient and misunderstood? Nietzsche still divides opinion.

Paul Patton: Some of his remarks about women are among the most offensive of Nietzsche’s writings. I take these to be indications of the extent to which he was a man of his time who could not see beyond the existing cultural forms of the sexual division of humankind. Like the vast majority of nineteenth century European men, Nietzsche could not divorce female affect, intelligence and corporeal capacities from a supposed “essential’ relation to child-bearing. His views on women are representative of his attitude toward morality and politics in the sense that they are in tension with possibilities otherwise opened up by his historical conception of human nature. For example, at times he recognizes that supposedly natural qualities of women or men are really products of particular social arrangements. We can conclude from this, even if he could not, that these qualities are not natural but open to change. In this domain as in other of his social and political views, he was not able to foresee some of the ways in which the very dynamics of human cultural evolution that he identified could lead us into a very different future.

Here for the article.

The above picture is by San Francisco photographer Naseema Khan. Inserted into fruit are fragments of Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil”, a text that challenges the concepts of meaning and reason.

Amir ElSaffar’s unique blend of contemporary jazz and traditional Iraqi song forms has led him to the forefront of the avant-garde jazz trumpet scene. This 30 year old Chicago born trumpeter, singer, and santoor player might be quite humble about his own music – “There’s not much to know about it, you can ask me questions later”, he opened a recent concert in New York – but he’s definitely pushing a more radical agenda of cross-cultural connections. A recent article in The Wire talks about his latest recording, Two Rivers:

That cultural divide is most plainly played out in ElSaffar’s Blues In E-Half-Flat, which closes the disc. To write a piece on santoor, call it a blues and sing it in Arabic, to steep a song so deeply in the traditions of America and Iraq, whose fortunes are currently so violently linked, has to be a kind of commentary – or if not, the composer has to be prepared for such conclusions to be drawn. “It’s a 12-bar using E-half-flat as the ‘blue’ note,” he explains. “I think it’s a beautiful part of that music, that sound that we associate with Middle Eastern tonality – that wail, that cry, it’s a universal part of the human condition and it’s something I really came across in Iraqi music.”

ElSaffar, who played with the likes of Pierre Boulez, Cecil Taylor and Dave Douglas, grew up as the son of an Iraqi Shiite Muslim and a Christian American mother. His father was a devout fan of American jazz, while he was exposed to traditional Iraqi music at family gatherings. Despite the ongoing war he doesn’t consider his music political: “It’s kind of more anti-political because the politics, as far as I can see, haven’t done anything to help, not from any angle. I think the music has a very positive message and effect. But I’ve never found any slogans in this situation to stand up for.”

Here for the artist’s website.

Here for downloadable music.

Today, Romania seems to have overcome the challenges of reconstructing its film industry along with the country itself, following Ceauşescu’s communist dictatorship which ended in 1989. Recent films as The Death of Mr Lasarescu and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days have won prizes internationally and film series presenting this Romanian New Wave appear in cinemas worldwide.

One name stands out from the list of recently lauded filmmakers. While most of these directors began their filmic careers in the decades directly preceding or following the political change, Lucian Pintilie got his start in the 1960s. His subtly subversive masterpiece Reenactment (1968) was banned by Romanian officials, who forced the filmmaker into exile.

The tragic and the grotesque merge in his latest work, the medium-length film Tertium Non Datur (2005). According to the director, the film “is a tragicomic parable about the integration of the poorest of the poor, ridden by complexes, into the fiction which we provisionally call Europe.” Exploring the notions of national identity and dignity may seem somewhat anachronistic in an era of transnationalism. Pintilie, however, is using these themes to relocate his country into the larger framework of the European continent. This question is especially pertinent in the face of Romania’s recent accession to the European Union in January of 2007.

Some of the recent films have found wider distribution. Check your local listings.

National Gallery of Art: here.

Pacific Film Archive: here.

There’s a lot going on lately relating to The Black Panther Party. First of all, L.A.’s MOCA is hosting an extensive solo-exhibition by the Panther’s most important visual artist Emory Douglas. Curated by Sam Durant, the exhibition looks at the artist’s works as a powerful graphic record of the Black Panthers’ legacy, reflecting their development and evolving mission to improve the lives of African Americans. Calling for resistance and change, Douglas portrayed a people emerging from segregation and proudly fighting to assert their rights to equality.

Here for Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas.

At a symposium about the artistic legacy of the Black Panther Party, recently organized by MICA in Baltimore, I had the opportunity to briefly talk with Emory Douglas. The symposium focused mostly on the avant-garde characteristics of the movement, leaving aside their radical left-wing, anarchist and armed aspirations. When Douglas talked about the strategy behind his visual artworks –“taking icons and symbols outside their usual context to show what they really mean, so that people can resist and change them”– I couldn’t help but think about the Situationist International’s concept of détournement. When asked about this, Emory Douglas talked about an extended exchange that took place between the Panthers and the Situationist International. With other French intellectuals, such as Jean Genet and Nouvelle Vague initiators Agnès Varda, Jean Luc Godard and Jean Seberg, strategies and resources were extensively exchanged. Most remarkably, Agnès Varda’s film Black Panther’s – Huey! transports you to the crucial Free Huey rally held on February 17th, 1968 (Huey Newton’s birthday). Here:

Taking those considerations aside, the excellent exhibition Black Panther Rank and File is still on view at MICA’s Decker and Meyerhoff Galleries.

Here for resources.

Azra Aksamija is an Austrian artist and architect who was born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. She has developped a provocative body of work that explores “ways of negotiating spatial relationships of Islamic religious practices and identities in a secular and contemporary context”. Her work combines the best of Krzysztof Wodiczko’s interventionist art projects with Lucy Orta’s transformable clothes. Here’s what we-make-money-not-art has to say about Survival Mosque:

Survival Mosque is a kit containing elements for the self protection of Muslims living in the USA today: an American-flag pattern that communicates patriotism, an umbrella that surveys one’s back, washing solution for ablution and for cleaning when a Muslim get spit on, ear plugs against insults, American constitution proofing rights of American Muslims, a loud-speaker with speech on tolerance held by President George W. Bush, educative books, communication devices, etc. The mosque is self-sufficient; the prayer rug is supplying its own energy source via photo-voltaic solar cells. The Survival Mosque can be transformed and camouflaged into bags, which communicate with each other via bluetooth. The bag-speakers reflect paranoia spreading messages regarding terrorism, but they can also function as muezzins; calling for prayer at prayer times. The kit challenges the way diverse prejudices and fears to Muslims could be reversed.

Here for Azra Aksamija’s website.

Here for an interview with the artist.