go_HOME, Danica Dakic and Sandra Sterle, Zagreb-New York

[anna balint]

go_HOME dinner #3: Transitory Cases: Language, Media, and Migration

Danica Dakic and Sandra Sterle will be joined by scholars, educators, and
theoreticians in New York and in Zagreb Croatia to discuss issues of language in a
world in flux.  The event will take place in online on November 11, 2001,
and webcast at www.location1.org or www.project-go-home.com starting at
2:00 pm US Eastern Time and 8:00 pm Central European Time. This dinner
discussion will be point-to-point web-streamed with the new media center
Mama (Mi2), in Zagreb. These two sites will each organize a parallel,
interactive dinner gathering for their evening of web-streamed dialogue
with New York. New York diners will include: Martha Wilson, artist; Ammiel
Alcalay, translator; Katherine Carl, curator; Elizabeth Cohen, artist;
Danica Dakic, artist; Slavko Kacumko, video art historian; Beka Nanic,
language teacher; Atsushi Ogata, video artist; Shelly Silver, video artist;
Sandra Sterle, artist; George Yudice, cultural studies scholar. As part of
go_HOME, Danica Dakic and Sandra Sterle have developed their own personal
daily diaries to record events and reflections that evolve during their
time in New York this fall. They are translating this everyday personal
language into technological projects that will be widely available online.
During this process, we have been navigating the gulf that exists between
the personal vernacular and sophisticated mass communication. Why is there
is such a strong desire to bridge these areas, and how does this
processwith the need for expensive equipment and technical expertiseaffect
the status of the individual artist? Can this artistic language developed
on the internet be related, or not, to the ways in which communication
technology mediates the experience of migration, whether via fax, email,
radio, telephone, film, television, or video?
At the heart of go_HOME is the investigation of the relationships between
the private space and language of home, notions of community, and modes of
public communication and journey. How does technology’s influence on our
mobility and our imagination impact migration? Does it, as cultural
theorist Arjun Appadurai asserts, influence more people to migrate now than
ever before, and how does this work in tandem with other factors that have
historically led to mobility or displacement? In this scheme, does language
persist as the basic facilitator of communication or become a boundary? Is
our 'mother tongue' the most basic connection to home, or do we now inhabit
a migratory and multilingual era which shifts the emphasis to other sensory
evocations of belonging such as tastes, textures, tones, smells, and  gestures.

Artist Biographies:
Bosnian artist Danica Dakic creates sculptural installations, site-specific
video projections, and public architectural sound projects to investigate
the corporal and global aspects of identity and language, as well as the
tensions that arise between collective and individual experience. Her video
installation Zid/Wall (1998) comprises 64 square images of mouths telling
stories in different languages, edited into a collage recalling bricks in a
wall or a patchwork of parallel individual stories. Zid/Wall highlights
Dakic’s concern with the relationship between architecture, the body, and
identity. In her video installation Autoportrait (1999), two languages and
stories emerge from a barely animated bust of the artist. In this image,
the artist’s mouth is doubled, replacing her eyes and enabling her to tell
fairytales simultaneously in Bosnian and German. As this disconcerting
image obscures recognition of Dakic’s face by obliterating the artist’s
eyes, it also portrays the composite of language, stories, and homes that
make up her identity. Dakic’s work has been shown at the Moderna Museet,
Stockholm, Sweden (1999); Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna,
Austria (1999); and she has created site-specific public projects in
Bratislava, Slovakia, and in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. She was an
ArtsLink Fellow in 1999. Dakic was born in Sarajevo and studied at the
Academy of Art in Sarajevo, the Academy of Art in Belgrade, and the Academy
of Art in Dusseldorf. She lives and works in Dusseldorf, Germany, and in
Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Croatian artist Sandra Sterle creates
fantastic and enigmatic personas in her practice of video, media
installation, web projects, photography, and performance. Inhabiting
various quasi-fictional identities, including a mad woman, a Croatian
peasant, an eery Minnie Mouse, and a poet, in her CD-ROM The Characters
(1998), she investigates shifts, gaps, and areas of overlap in identities
and language. For Sterle, the identity of the medium itself can be
multiple, as she explores how the lives of ephemeral, process-oriented
works of art are affected, and in some cases eluded, by sophisticated modes
of documentation. Sterle examines the tension and coexistence of
traditional and contemporary ways of life, and situations in which
technology and tradition inform each other as they represent human emotions
and fears. Sterle collaborated with artist Dan Oki on the performance and
interactive language media project, To Forget, To Remember, and to Know
(1998) at Amsterdam College in The Netherlands, the school that nearly all
new immigrants attend to learn Dutch. Her work has been shown at Škuc
Gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenia (2000); Museum of Modern Art, Arnhem (1998);
Videomedeja, Novi Sad, Yugoslavia (1997); and she has created site-specific
public work in Nettlecombe, United Kingdom, and has designed several online
projects. She was an ArtsLink Fellow in 1999. Sterle was born in Zadar,
Croatia, and she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Croatia,
and the Academy of Art in Dusseldorf. She teaches video art at the Art
Academy in Split, Croatia, and lives there and in Amsterdam, The
Netherlands. Go_HOME is co-directed by Fritzie Brown and curator Katherine
Carl.

Partners:
Go_HOME is an ArtsLink Special project funded by the Animating Democracy
Initiative, a program of Americans for the Arts funded by the Ford
Foundation; the Trust for Mutual Understanding; the Kettering Family
Foundation; CEC International Partners; and Franklin Furnace’s "The Future
of the Present" program. Location One, New York, will conduct the web
streaming activities through its network of international affiliates. The
Sarajevo Center for Contemporary Arts will host the point-to-point online
discussion in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, on October 14. The new
media center Mama (Mi2), with the non-governmental organization What, How,
and For Whom, will host the point-to-point online discussion in Zagreb,
Croatia, on November 11.
IMAGES AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST
Press Contact:  Fritzie Brown:  212.643.1985 x23
Katherine Carl:  718.398.0107