Bird Catcher (IV), installation, 2016
"It takes so little, so infinitely little, for someone to find himself on the other side of the border, where everything - love, convictions, faith, history - no longer has some meaning. The whole mystery of human life resides in the fact that it is spent in the immediate proximity of, and even in direct contact with, that border, that it is separated from it not by kilometers but by barely a millimeter."
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera
The original idea for this piece comes from my previous work Bird Catcher (2011). Bird Catcher is based on a scene I observed several years ago during a trip to one of the Central Asian countries: a bird market where living birds are packed in small fabric bags hanging on a wall. In the context of the local culture it has a tradition behind but for me, this scene found a symbolic value and became a universal metaphor of the unique and directly endured human existence. Over the last few years, I worked regularly with this motive of the bird inside a fabric bag which has become a strong base for some of my other pieces while the piece Bird Catcher was transformed and exists now in several versions. My idea to continue to work with this motive for the exhibition The Border came as a reaction on the topic. One of the culturological definitions of the word Border, in the most general sense, is understood as the boundary of collective identity separating the individual we from the general they. And this brings to the philosophical topic of The Other. So, in this case, I am interested in a perspective of intersubjectivity and I wanted to work on the topic of the border on the level of existential experience. (Gaisha Madanova)
For Gaisha Madanova, this situation symbolises the feeling of exclusion in a foreign land: language and behaviour make one feel extremely isolated. How does one behave and how does one speak in such an environment? The fourth version of Bird Catcher was adapted especially for the exhibition »The Border«. It consists of an original video, a fabric bag from Central Asia, as well as two additional elements made especially for the exhibition: silver sequined, glittering foil and a blue LED light––they are references to the nearby Chinese (world) market. The presentation of the work in a barely open crate also refers to the theme of the border between the individual and the (foreign) collective surrounding him. (Inke Arns)
Gaisha Madanova
* 1987 Almaty, Kazakhstan. Lives and works in Munich, Germany.
In 2009, she graduated from the Faculty of Architecture of Almaty College of Construction and Management. She has been a student of the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich (AdBK) since 2012. She is active as an artist and curator (DIYALOG: New Energies,VIENNAFAIR; VIDEO[ARTiFACT], Klaus vom Bruch; mikro[smART]raiony, Refunc) and has been involved in several projects organized by Goethe-Institut. Gaisha is the founder and editor-in-chief of the first in Kazakhstan conceptual art magazine ALUAN -an exhibition on paper.
