OPENING RECEPTION Wednesday, June 27, 7-9pm

Discussion between Maayan Sheleff and Dor Guez Monday, July 2, 6:30pm

Open Hours Wednesday – Saturday, 12-6pm

Participating artists: Lana Cmajcanin, Dor Guez, Adela Jusic, Juan Manuel Echavarria, Avi Mograbi and Michael Zupraner

Curated by Maayan Sheleff

‘Secondary Witness’ is curated by Maayan Sheleff, recipient of ISCP’s 2012 Curator Award, which offers the opportunity for a curator or curatorial collective to present a new group exhibition. This award was established in 2009 for participants in selected curatorial studies programs, as a response to the lack of opportunities for emerging curators to present institutional exhibitions in New York City.

The video works in ‘Secondary Witness’ touch upon the notion of testimony and explore the artist’s position as mediator. Various personal stories are presented in the included works, which reflect societies in a constant state of conflict and trauma. The artists in ‘Secondary Witness,’ natives to countries of conflict, examine their place as secondary witnesses and their relationship to protagonists and their testimonies.

Some of the artists choose to blur the boundaries between documenter and documented by entering the photographic frame, or handing the camera to the subjects themselves. One prominent example of this is Mich’ael Zupraner’s ‘Snow Tapes,’ in which he worked with materials shot by a Palestinian family, who documented their violent encounter with a group of neighboring Jewish settlers in Hebron. A more subtle example is Dor Guez’s ‘(Sa)mira,’ in which he acts as an invisible yet heard presence, re-examining his protagonist’s point of view by making her repeat her story, in which she recalls a traumatic moment when her Arab background is exposed, and she is asked to change her name to a Jewish one by her boss. Avi Mograbi is a prominent character in his work ‘Z32,’ where he debates (and sings) about the difficulty of recording an Israeli ex-soldier recounting a war crime he has committed.

At times the artists literally take the voice of their protagonist: Lana Čmajčanin stands at a podium, reading the testimony of a Bosnian woman who was raped during the Bosnian War, while Adela Jusic reads her grandmother’s memories as she washes her hair repeatedly. These acts of over identification also externalize a mode of control and manipulation over the protagonists. Like Čmajčanin and Jusic, many of the artists search for a performative testimony that will reflect a subjective feeling. This performativity is evident in Juan Manuel Echavarria’s ‘Mouths of Ashes,’ where survivors of massacres in sequestered villages in Colombia put their traumatic experiences into music and sing them in front of the camera.

The subjective, performative and poetic testimonies reflect an abandonment of the need to represent the real, and an attempt to construct a new reality, as a critical act. With many moments of humor and grace, they reject the commonly accepted notion of truth, question definitions of victim versus perpetrator, and challenge preconceptions. The undermining of the customary power relations between documenter and documented, with regard for the resulting internal contradictions and complexities, is a call to alter the existing balance of powers between strong and weak, heard and silenced. It calls upon the viewer, as a third witness, to add their own memories and experiences, to reconsider his/her passive position in power relations, and to take a more active position in their realignment.