Conflictual Distance

Conflictual Distance probes concrete approaches to presenting distant conflicts to the local public. The exhibition considers conflict through the lens of political exile and cultural diasporas, focusing on immigrant artists' experimental approaches to processing distant conflicts in local contact zones. When exhibitions are so often asked to carry out various forms of site-specific placemaking, called on to speak to an immediately present public, how can we make visible those experiences that are not fully legible from within an exhibition site's immediate surroundings? Whether the conflicts they address are personal or collective, each artist in Conflictual Distance tackles how the mediation of distant conflict pushes images to their infrastructural limit. Confronting the risk of their references becoming dislocated and decontextualized – misunderstood in their “foreign” setting – the media in these artists' works become modes of inscribing “elsewhere” here, where we find ourselves in the present. The cumulative effect of such exercises is to fashion a layered sense of place that can tackle critical issues, unbound to strict divisions between locality or foreignness.