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artist's statement ::
about the artist |
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Artist's Statement |
Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first
to shrink-wrap people's minds and then as ceremonial
shrouds to bury the dead.1 |
In January 2003--in the climate of post 9-11--the Bush
Administration devised a threat assessment color-coding
system for travelers under the banner of "Homeland
Security." Each traveler, under this pilot program, was
given a color threat label without any knowledge of being
branded.
"Yellow Citizen" situates the U.S. at the intersection of
two narratives: that of the Japanese Americans of World
War II- wherein thousands of innocent citizens were
forcibly relocated to internment camps across the country
in the name of "security"-and the Arab Americans of post
9-11, whose lives have exposed unconscionable violations
of civil liberties spawned by racism, illegal searches and
detentions. Like the "Yellow Peril" of the 40s, which
continues to ensue in many contexts for Japanese in the
U.S., the Arab American citizen now occupies this realm of
"danger." S/he has a natural proclivity towards violence,
betrayal, and hatred for freedom and modernity, and not
unlike the Japanese American of WW II living in the United
States for generations prior to internment, banished from
society like a cancerous limb in need of amputation. Once
again our nation confronts itself with a form of cultural
apartheid that literally seeks to separate and detain
"real Americans" from these alien-others.
The installation consists of video footage of Japanese
Americans being transported on trains and buses, and
building the very barracks that caged them, interspersed
with images of Arab/Muslim citizens. Across the wall, on
to which the video is projected, is a painted yellow band
that sweeps across the faces of those imaged on the video.
The band draws a connection to the Jewish Holocaust (when
Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, and the mentally ill were
forced to don color coded bands under the Third Reich)
with the post 9-11 climate of fear and terror, in effect
linking the current Bush administration to a long legacy
of hegemonic imperialism and racial profiling.
At the base of the video projection is a floor piece
composed of a rectangular surface of yellow tempera
powder, which reflects the band of yellow on the wall onto
which the video plays. The floor piece attempts to
challenge the charged political and symbolic function of
the color yellow by configuring it into a fragile essence
as it appears before us, devoid of any political
significance.
In this time of war, death, and destruction-and the
relentless suffering of innocent people here in the U.S.
and abroad-how is it that the grave injustice executed by
this nation on the Japanese American community has
dissipated from our collective memory, as we deploy
similar retaliatory measures to unbridled tragedy, making
enemies out of the innocent, while fanning the flames of
ignorance and aggression? That "day of infamy," when the
empire of Japan preemptively struck the US at Pearl
Harbor, has returned under the specter of "Iraq," and yet
another community is the target of suspicion."Yellow Citizen" positions Japanese Americans and Arab
Americans at the threshold of peace and devastation,
representing solidarity in the struggle for recognition
and restitution from a nation that consists of so much
more complexity and diversity than it would otherwise
represent. It hopes to remind us of lessons that should
have been learned so that they will never be repeated
again.
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¹Arundhati Roy, War Talk, (New York: South End
Press, 2003) p. 47 |
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About the Artist
Abdelali Dahrouch is a conceptual media artist who lives
in Los Angeles, and works between the U.S., France, and
Morocco. Born in Tangier, and raised between Morocco and
France, Dahrouch emigrated to the U.S. in 1984 to pursue
multimedia art as a vehicle to address the political and
social issues in which he was immersed as an activist and
writer. His work engages transnational migration and
U.S./European imperialism largely in relation to the
Middle East and North Africa.
Dahrouch graduated from Pratt Institute in New York
with a Masters of Fine Arts. He was a fellow in residence
at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study
Program in New York; the Cultural Exchange Station at
Tabor in the Czech Republic; the Cimelice Castle in
Cimelice, Czech Republic; and the Metamedia Center for the
Arts in Plasy, Czech Republic. In November 2003, he was a
Visiting Artist at Home Works II-2003: A Forum on
Cultural Practices in Beirut, Lebanon organized by
Ashkal Alwan, the Lebanese Society of Plastic Arts, a
non-profit arts organization, funded by the Ford
Foundation. He received an "Intra-nation" BANFF Residency
Fellowship in Banff, Canada in Summer 2004.
Dahrouch has exhibited his work in New York, Chicago,
Portland (OR), Los Angeles, Seville (Spain), Sophia
(Bulgaria), and Tabor, Cimelice, Plasy and Prague (Czech
Republic). His most recent solo exhibition entitled,
Desert Sin, Revisited, was on view from August to
October 2003 at Montgomery Art Museum, Pomona College in
Claremont, California. His current work is currently on
view at the Athens Institute of Contemporary Art in
Athens, Georgia; the Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman
University in Orange, California; and Liquidation Total
Art Space in Madrid, Spain. His upcoming shows will be at
the W. Keith and Janet Kellogg University Art Gallery at
California Polytechnic University in Pomona; the
University of Alabama; The Puffin Room in New York;
Articultural Gallery in Santa Monica, California; and the
University of California at Berkeley. |
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