experiences. Here is an image of a world that is based on and which represents actual happenings that are so unusual that they seem to be the work of fiction.
“The whole world is full of clouds and fiction. That’s why we
called the project Kafkanistan. As in Austrian novelist Franz Kafka’s novel, “The Castle,” Kafka writes about how people don’t actually know what is happening, although they seem to understand; where everything is bizarre, strange and based on rumors, and people don’t know who and what can or cannot be trusted. The world we traveled is just like that.”
—Lukas Birk
The birth of the Kafkanistan project (this book and an accompanying film), and the dilemma of the invented tourists of Sean Foley and Lukas Birk, originated with an email in spring 2005, when anthropologist Foley asked artist/ photographer Lukas Birk to join him on a trip to explore the world of tourism in Pakistan and Afghanistan as fictional characters; Sean using the name Kartunwallah (one who blindly transgresses) and Lukas as Smiley Whalla (one who smiles irresistibly). This incredible inquiry was an idea born in 2001 when the US military launched its campaign in the region, claiming to fight terrorism. This resulting journal, Kafkanistan, explores how we are all influenced by the media. Believing that many of us will never visit the region and all we know about it is what we read in the newspapers and what we see on television, the authors were interested in perceptions based on the media versus their reality as visitors; which are, through firsthand experience and interviews with the local people and the objects in their lives, documented in this book. But this is not a straightforward journal, because through their inquiry the travelers discovered that the “real” world of the tourist in this region is so bizarre that it is a surreal one, and so each man adopted an identity to better integrate in his travels through the universe of “Kafkanistan,” to aptly describe
This remarkable book/journal/work of reality-fiction is the first of its kind and one that not only documents an actual environment visited by made-up characters, but presents to the reader the real Afghanistan and Pakistan—places where the surreal and the real meet in everyday life, objects, and experiences.
About the Authors Lukas Birk is an Austrian visual artists and explorer with focus on Central and East Asia. He exhibits his work regularly around the globe and has setup arts program in China and Indonesia. Sean Foley specializes in visual anthropology and works as a researcher on art projects in India, Pakistan and Greece. He was born in Ireland. Both travel the world constantly, spending most of their time in Indonesia.
Specifications 234 pages, 8 ¼ x 8 ½, paperback with flaps 150 black-and-white and 80 four-color photographs $35; ISBN-13: 978-3200011304
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