“Building a Passport Exhibition” is a durational participatory performance and a collective exhibition creation process, initially staged and in view at Myymälä2, Art Gallery in Helsinki, Finland in August 2021, within the scope of Relational Art Week (RAW) festival.
During the live durational performance, the audience is provided with large photocopies of my visas, printed from my expired Kosovo/a passport which I’m a national of. In response to the sentiments evoked by looking at and analyzing these photocopies, the audience is invited to verbally express visceral and impromptu descriptions of them, while I simultaneously type on a typewriter as they speak. I then cut and set these descriptions below the photocopies that get placed on the walls, hereby building an exhibition. Once the walls are filled with the photocopies, I invite the audience to draw on them planar drawings relating to geotechnical investigations, thus disrupting the fixed identity carried by a passport by shifting the focus from legislation to territory. The audience is also welcomed to draw on them anything else that they wish or that the passport page photocopies evoke. Due to the ‘contemporary’ descriptions and due to being placed in a gallery space, these prints become transformed into art works. Should the paintings be available for sale, I will sign contracts with everyone who has defaced the photocopies, making them contributing artists of these works and offering them a percentage of the proceeds from the sale. The co-artists of course are welcome to negotiate the percentage or refuse the offer.
Conceptually speaking, this performance aims to challenge the whiteness and the sterility of the gallery space by accommodating in it a disciplined body with a displaced sense of belonging and restricted movement. Here I explore the relation between my officially confirmed existence (by stamps, numbers, and registry) and actual physical, emotional presence (in the gallery). Having lived most of my life in Kosovo/a, a war-recovering country, I had to face scrutinous bureaucracy every time I wanted to leave my country. The limitations, isolation and othering reflect on the subtext of country borders and how these disciplining elements can be translated in an environment that doesn’t suffer from similar restrictions but deals with other sentiments such as fear of immigrants or the opposite, championing and advocating pro-immigration. Will this performance process and exhibition evoke gratitude, or will it translate into empathy in a different level? Will it cause awareness and shame of privilege, or will it motivate to actively challenge bordering as a concept in its multiple facets and possibilities of existing? These are some of the questions I’d like to provoke through this performance and exhibition.
© photographer Veera Kuusisto
https://www.myymala2.com/?p=6685
The second iteration of the performance took place during Ten in TENN artist presentation at CoopGallery in Nashville, TN.
The experience was very different from that in Helsinki. While the Helsinki audience followed my instructions and participated in a structural manner based on which the invited participants came up with names for the enlarged visa and stamp photocopies one by one and stood up to ‘deface’ my visas in a systemic format, the participants in Nashville, all stood up pretty much at once, formed small groups which took charge, hammered the prints on the walls with nails and painted them together. Then as instructed by me, they came to let me know what the name of the work would be, we determined together what the price of the work would be and signed contracts based on which we agreed on a percentage I would share with them, should the works be sold.
I am not holding one form of interaction higher to the other, yet I am very curious to observe the cultural differences that each iteration of this performance unfolds.
https://www.coopgallery.org/exhibitions/a27s3zpavsegqheygex4ifrs9pmsss
©Kelly Ann Graff and Dylan R. Simon