Margareta Kern will be an artist-in-residence, at the University of Bath's department of Social Science and the Institute of Contemporary Interdisciplinary Arts, from March until June 2010. Supported by the Arts Council England. For further information please see http://www.bath.ac.uk/icia
"As a photography curator, I am particularly fascinated by her exploration of the relationship between cloth, memory and photography..." continue rading on Axis website.
On being a guest (or when histories become stories and stories histories) The 28th State: European Borders in an Age of Anxiety - Tate Britain, October 2009
Margareta Kern presented her work at a recent symposia The 28th State: European Borders in an Age of Anxiety, at the Tate Britain. Kern's talk brought together the material from her recent residency in Berlin, consisting of the photographs from the albums of 'guest worker' women who arrived to West Berlin between 1968 and 1973, from Yugoslavia; Kern's photographs of Berlin and personal documents of migration to the UK. It also included photographs from her grandparents' album, who migrated to Germany as ‘guest workers’, and whose life story has largely inspired the whole project. While at the same time weaving a (hi)story about this marginalised moment in the history of migration (from/in Yugoslavia, and its successor countries), Kern also posed questions pertinent to her practice and the project, such as the position and ethics of an artist who draws on ethnographic/anthropological modes of working, the relationship of archive, memory and history to storytelling and fiction, and the role of image making in these contexts.
To continue reading about the talk and the GUESTS project please click here.
GUESTS PROJECT BLOG
http://guestworkerberlin.blogspot.com/
The symposia questioned how artists and curators in Europe are currently engaging with ideas around borders, nationhood, social organisation and collaboration. What is role of art within this context, particularly in relation to the current state of European politics and increasing social unease within many rapidly changing populations? Part of Borderline project, curated by Sonya Dyer. Supported by Chelsea Programme, Chelsea College of Art and Design and City Inn Westminster.
Clothes for Living and Dying/Odjeca za Zivot i Smrt International touring solo exhibition
Installation images from the Impressions gallery, 2009, Bradford, UK
'Clothes for Living and Dying' brings together two interrelated projects 'Graduation Dresses' and 'Clothes for Death' in order to explore the significance and role of clothing in two rites of passage: graduations and funerals.
Graduation Dresses consists of a series of photographs Kern takes of young women, who have recently graduated from secondary schools in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Their dresses made by the artist's mother, are based on images found on the Internet and in fashion magazines, of celebrities wearing haute couture dresses.
Clothes for Death is an ongoing research based project documenting women in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina who prepare clothes in which they wish to be buried. Deeply moved upon hearing about this relatively unknown and private custom, Kern set out on a complex journey, meeting and photographing the women who have agreed to share their utmost personal possessions, the clothes in which they have chosen to be buried in.
"Margareta Kern, by being in her mother's tailoring salon, and photographing in the Banjaluka homes, has done a very important self-reflective act. The imitation of life, which she captured through the graduation dresses, is in fact, in the broadest possible way, an imitation of an identity. One cannot get rid of an identity, no matter how much one wanted, no matter how much one didn't need it anymore and no matter how much it seemed like an imitation.In one of the photographs, taken in Orubica, in Croatia, a woman is sitting on her bed, in front of a cheap wall tapestry of the 'Last Supper'. She is barefoot, her hands in her lap. Her head is in the place where in the tapestry picture sits Jesus Christ. We may have not even noticed that, were it not for the expression on her face, which is neither sad nor contemplative. She is neither posing, nor completely relaxed. She looks like someone who is waiting. That female Jesus in the photograph of Margareta Kern is one of the possible answers to the question why take photographs."
Miljenko Jergovic, for Jutarnji List (The Morning Post, Zagreb, May 2008). Full article in Croatian/English.
Clothes for Living & Dying is UH Galleries touring exhibition in collaboration with respective venues.
A fully illustrated catalogue with essays by Pennina Barnett, Dr Alex Rotas, Matthew Shaul and Margareta Kern, is available at respective touring venues or by contacting Amisha Karia, UH Galleries Support Officer T: 01707 284290.
The following is an excerpt from the catalogue essay by Pennina Barnett titledA Respectful Distance: The Negotiation of Space in Margareta Kern's Clothes for Death
"Susan Sontag describes photography as 'an elegiac art... touched with pathos.' Kern's photographs have a melancholic air about them, so to ask how absence is inscribed within Clothes for Death may seem absurd. It's there of course in the display of carefully selected clothes worn only in death; the Christian iconography that adorns so many rooms; the unstinting gaze that pierces each image. But it also lurks in the very organisation of pictorial space: the sparse whitewashed walls that corner the diminutive figure of Rosa; the materiality of their uneven surfaces and small soft shadow cast upon them; the open wooden chest emptied of burial clothes; and similar effects across the series - an empty cardboard box; the 'vacant' bed that Liza faces, as if at a wake; stretches of windowless walls, the occasional window, blinded with light, like a blank canvas. Yet death is constantly interrupted by the detail of life, in all its ordinariness: a blue mug, a bedside light, a carton of juice. Death and life in uncanny relation."
The exhibition reviews: The element of ambiguity Kern feels on her return is evident in these photographs. There is a sense of transience experienced on both sides of the lens, a mutual searching for identity....The most telling of the photographs, however, are the 'Clothes for Death'. Likened in the catalogue to memento mori or vanitas, these are poignant and affecting images in which eight elderly women are portrayed alongside the skirts, blouses and headscarves they will only wear when dead. A record of the most intimate of wardrobes, a form of trousseau for death, these photographs are as much about life as its ending; content, vulnerable, resolute, uncertain, proud and layered with texture. June Hill, for embroidery, July-August 2009
People who have witnessed traumatic social and political upheaval gaze with what seems like fearless resignation, not just at Kern's lens, but towards the event for which they have prepared their outfit. Tina Jackson for Metro, Bradford, review: 4 stars, June 2009
A young woman stands in her inexpensive copy of the draped gold dress Keira Knightley wore to the British premiere of Pirates of the Caribbean II. It should be a shoddy image of consumer capitalism but actually it's heart-breaking. ... Kern is more interested in the politics of fashion than clothing per se. But there is a lingering pleasure to the 'textileness' of the pictures. ... There is a quiet heroism to these older citizens anticipating the end of life - a voyage to the unknown. ... Photography can be intrusive, but there is respectfulness to the images, a sense of care. Liz Hoggard, for Selvedge, Issue 27, Mar/April 2009
Pola Ure Kulture, HTV 1, 2008, 5 min (only available in Croatian)
Margareta Kern has been selected as one of the recipients of the National Media Photography Bursary 2008/09 to assist her with the continuation and completion of the Clothes for Death project. The photographes together with the new journey notes and reflections, produced as part of the bursary, will soon be available on this website. www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk
Clothes for Death/Odjeca za Smrt is a research based visual art project documenting women in Croatia and Bosnia & Herzegovina who prepare clothes in which they wish to be buried.
CitiesMethodologies SLADE SCHOOL OF ART RESEARCH CENTRE London, 28 – 29th MAY 2009
An interdisciplinary event on innovative methodologies across the arts and humanities | Exploring the city and its multi-faceted realities | Showcasing concrete examples that push the boundaries of urban research | Exhibits, installations, films and workshops for exchanging ideas.
SECOND SKINS: Cloth and Difference
30th April 2009
Iniva Symposium @ Rivington Place, London
Second Skins aims to open up a dialogue on 'cloth and difference' via a series of cross-cultural and interdisciplinary exchanges. Issues of identity and cultural heritage are readily expressed through cloth and its tactile quality induces personal and collective associations. Cloth ‘speaks'. By drawing together creative thinkers across visual art, design, cultural studies, anthropology and sociology, Second Skins explores the production, consumption and language of cloth.
Speakers include cultural critics and curators: Yasmin Canvin, Jessica Hemmings, John Hutnyk, Sarat Maharaj, Sarah Quinton, Barbara Taylor, and artists: Sokar Douglas Camp CBE, Raimi Gbadamosi, Hans Hamid Rasmussen, Margareta Kern, Grace Ndiritu, and Rosanna Raymond with a specially commissioned performance.
