SØREN DAHLGAARD: THE MALDIVES EXODUS CARAVAN SHOW FEDERATION SQUARE AMPHITHEATRE
The Maldives Exodus Caravan Show is a mobile and nomadic art installation curated by Melbourne-based Danish artist Søren Dahlgaard.Within the relational and critical practice of contemporary art, Dahlgaard’s work can be approached in a variety of ways: as a referencing and reimagining of land art and sculpture, and as a public and participatory commentary on climate change and democracy. It is also a socially engaged practice, in the sense that art historian Grant Kester recognises: This is a complex, unruly area of practice that is distinguished by its extraordinary geographic scope … driven by a common desire to establish new relationships between artistic practice and other fields of knowledge production … Throughout this field of practice we see a persistent engagement with sites of resistance and activism and a desire to move beyond existing definitions of both art and the political.1
Through the use of a ‘site-specific’ caravan (Dahlgaard sources each caravan locally), a space is opened up for dialogue on the politics of art, climate, democracy and mobility. For example, on visiting the caravan you can pull up a deckchair outside and chat with the artists and volunteers, or engage in a playful wrestle over climate change—in Political Climate Wrestle with New Zealand artist Mark Harvey. That might be enough of an engagement challenge for most people! Nevertheless, it is inside the caravan where much of the artwork is situated and contextualised. Among other works (a selective list is configured below), there is: Flooded
1 Grant Kester, ‘Editorial’, in FIELD: A Journal of Socially-engaged Art Criticism, issue 1, spring 2015.
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McDonald’s, 2009, a video by SUPERFLEX of Denmark in which a convincing life-sized replica of the interior of a McDonald’s restaurant, without any customers or staff present, gradually floods with water; and also Facts on the Ground, 2010, a video by Bik Van der Pol of Holland, documenting a large land reclamation project in Holland which used the same ship that pumps sand and reclaims islands in Maldives.You also encounter the latest available media information on the reversal of democracy in the Maldives and the plight of Mohamed Nasheed, who was the country’s first democratically elected president. It was while he was incumbent as President of the Maldives (2008–12) that he was deposed in a coup led by security forces in 2012. More recently, in March 2015, he was imprisoned in the Maldives on charges of so-called ‘terrorism’. Mohamed Nasheed first became world famous in 2009 for hosting a Cabinet meeting underwater to highlight the very real concerns of his atoll island homelands and the need to act on climate change on a global scale. This was a highly performative and artistic political act in its own right. Jon Shenk’s award-winning documentary The Island President, 2011, about the rise of Nasheed and his challenges at the COP15 climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009, can also be viewed in the caravan. Of course, the motif of the caravan here symbolises both a home and mobility. This is something we frequently take for granted in the West, in the sense that we feel entitled to our mobility, as it is a symbol of our ‘freedom’ and is normatively perceived as an inherently positive, unrestricted public good—as with the itinerant (and privileged) class of the international academic or business person, or indeed artist.Those nomadic lives are glossed positively as charming and cosmopolitan, lives to aspire to, and then there is the paradox of perception encountered through the ‘threat of the other’, as when people are forced to move around the globe and seek new homes and livelihoods, whether through political or climate conditions. On approaching this art installation it immediately arrests the senses, as it also has an inflatable desert island ‘floating’ atop the otherwise obvious mobile home of the caravan. Søren Dahlgaard playfully signals the very real and perennial threat of exodus, and indeed the precariousness of both politics and climate change for the conditions of home for the Maldives, and us all. The proposition and actual possibility of an ensuing need for exodus and the threat of being rendered un-free to move (as with Nasheed) or even to be made stateless are increasingly globalised issues. Indeed, in different circumstances, this is effectively what happened with the Maldives’ near neighbours in the Chagos islands. Nearer to home, it’s a politics Australia is already dangerously embroiled in with its responses to managing its borders. Such deep and subtle themes of transformation and adaptation are also real lives and lived experiences and concerns that both resonate across and bridge the spheres of politics and climate change. James Oliver, Centre for Cultural Partnerships, The University of Melbourne
The Maldives Exodus Caravan Show
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Opposite top to bottom: Superflex, video still from Flooded McDonalds, 2009. Courtesy of the artist. Søren Dahlgaard, The Maldives Exodus Caravan Show, 2015. Photos: Mark Hanlin. Mark Harvey, video still from Political Climate Wrestle, Venice Biennale 2013. Courtesy of the artist.
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