Navigate / Oscar Lara and Arturs Punte / FFKD / 2012
Text: Maria Gry Bregnbak
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“Navigation”: Though commonly used, this noun still retains an air of adventure. It is a at speaks of travel, of being able to locate your position in the world at any given time. Today, the encircled red dot on a virtual map supplies instant position: You are here. Right at this point, at this time, in this place. You will always be able to locate this exact spot again instead of trying to remember whether it was left or right at the coffee shop and without losing your way in the vast cityscape.

To navigate the unknown and to transform it into something different are some of the issues at stake in this exhibition. In their artistic practices, Arturs Punte (LV) and Oscar Lara (PE/SE) approach these questions but in very different ways. Where Oscar Lara engages in the harsh reality of asylum centres, Arturs Punte focuses on the unknown by trying to familiarize himself with places through words, sounds, and images. By constructing a soundscape from live recordings at a given place and by allowing a story and its textuality to be the driving force, Punte’s documentary spills into the fictional.

Travelling from one place to another and leaving one’s native country behind, whether a voluntary act or not, is a challenge to most people. Even shorter trips are embedded with a kind of uncertainty that begins at the destination where unknown languages mix with strange noises and airport smells, little pieces of comprehensible conversations trigger distant memories, recognition and alienation melt into one. The state of being in transit is usually referred to as a temporary state although this is far from the case for some. The state of permanent transit has been at the core of Lara’s work for years, and his research into the field of the immigrant population of Copenhagen centres on its bureaucratic framework.

The artists, Arturs Punte and Oscar Lara, are two people whose paths have only crossed in the virtual world until now. What they have in common is a FAIR residency at FFKD last year and a desire to explore the intersection of their respective work – an intersection that shows new aspects of their work and generates entirely new meanings.

ARTUR PUNTE works with sound and words and is a member of Orbita, a creative collective of Russian poets and artists. He is a media artist and translator from Riga, Latvia. A graduate of the Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow, he is the author of two books of poetry in Russian and has published in the journals Daugava, Vozdukh, Karogs, World Literature Today, Vavilon, Orbita and others. He has participated in many international poetry festivals and has been translated into German, English, Italian, Czech and other languages.
OSCAR LARA’S artistic practice explores subjects such as social and ethnic diversity, immigration and integration, identity of inner objects and their relationship with their surroundings and most recently, the institution for the artist or the artist for the institution. His latest projects have involved sculpture installations, video-documentaries, performance and social development projects.

 

The project is supported by

The Nordic Baltic Mobility Programme
The City of Copenhagen
The Factory of Art and Design