Asya Reznikov Übersetzung - experiencing nostalgia during the 2. European month of photography

10. November 2006 – 06. Januar 2007

We are pleased to announce the first solo exhibition Übersetzung in Berlin of Asya Reznikov, scholar of the DAAD 2006/2007 graduate fellowship, at galerie OPEN. The multi-media artist from New York will be showing her recent work and the OPENing will be held on the 10.11.2006. The artist will be present.

Asya Reznikov explores human relationship to language, culture and travel through creating installations, which incorporate video, photography, audio, kinetic sculpture and drawing. She is interested in how language and culture precede human kind shaping their perception and understanding of reality. Through her work she explores different aspects of foreignness as personal identity, language, culture, emigration and immigration.

In her works she combines different cultural realities, confronting the self with the other and creates so with a pseudo-reality, that exists in a psychological space – nostalgia.
The interest in language and culture has to do with her personal cultural upbringing. Coming to the United States as a political refugee as a child has made her particularly aware of her cultural identity.

In Translation, a series of photographs, the images propose the impossible idea that translation dictionary pages allow one to understand foreign cultures and languages, while the photographic medium is associated with the representation of truth.

The foreignness to oneself takes also place in a familiar surrounding known to us as home. In the series D.O.B. the person’s social security number has been translated into its bar code and superimposed onto its owner’s portrait.

In her video installation Packing Asya Reznikov invites the viewer to look inside a suitcase, in which there is a projection of her packing items into that very suitcase. One becomes part of a space, a transition that precludes stopping, shared by all people from all cultures when they travel.

Her investigation of foreignness climaxes in the exhibition Übersetzung in the installation Tower of Babel. In this myth humanity speaks one language and as a punishment for their insolence, god conflates this universal language.

“Ironically, now people of various nationalities are desperately trying to preserve their respective languages in an effort to maintain their cultural identity, nationality and individuality. What was once seen as a curse is now an attribute.” (Asya Reznikov)

Opening reception at the gallery with Asya Reznikov is Friday, November 10th 2006 at 7pm. For further information please contact Alexandra Rockelmann / Valeska Mottmann 030 27582810.

galerie OPEN
Legiendamm 18-20
10179 Berlin
t 0049 (0)30 27582810
f 0049 (0)30 30875891
email: galerie-open@galerie-open.com
www.galerie-open.com
open: Tue-Sa 11-19

galerie OPEN, founded in september 2005, is located between the Berlin districts Kreuzberg and Mitte – directly where once the Berlin wall divided the city. The gallery provides a total of 157 square meters exhibition space. Its slogan is best formulated in the words of Cathy A. Malchiodis, who said to create art is “the basic human urge, a trait of our species as natural as language, sex, social interaction and aggression.”

The galerie OPEN artists mainly live and work in Berlin and New York. Even though their artistic styles differ the connection of the metropolitan influence is noticeable in their body of work. galerie OPEN wants to provide a platform of cultural exchange for these two metropoles and their artists.

This release was published on openPR.