In The Heart of The Heart of Another Country

About

“Emigration does not only involve leaving behind, crossing water, living amongst strangers, but, also, undoing the very meaning of the world.” John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, 1984.

Cultural studies in art questions stereotypes and traditions such as nationality, race, gender, and semiotics while exploring the qualities that determine our personal and social identity.

The problems faced by today’s immigrants are often shaped by the inability of these ideologies and concepts, which perpetually renew themselves. It is a crucial endeavour to deconstruct questions that no longer fit into the current dialect of mobility and identity. For that reason, the ongoing debates within the framework of social and political identities should find their grounds in the background formed by our unchangeable and unique nature, which is governed not by rigid law but by everchanging difference.

One of the critical reasons to look at the notion of the nation-state to understand and discuss the problems of immigrants is that it splits identity between humanity and citizenship, and further then between nativity and nationality. Breaking identity makes people weaker. The only rights that would protect us are the rights granted to us by nation-states: birthrights, political rights and the express legal rights we are given. Once we are stateless, we are rightless. Once we are just a human, we have no rights. That is why we need correlation, plural society, and of course, new legal systems to describe the reality of modern states.

Hannah Arendt, a political philosopher, indicates the core rhizomes of the crisis and says: "These communities, who cannot defend their rights as individuals, but whose rights tried to be secured by generalization by collective institutions and organisations, create a holistic perception but eventually and bitterly they have all realised that - on ne parvient pas deux fois- that is, you cannot make it twice.”

In the Heart / of the Heart / of Another Country features artworks by; Amy-Leigh Bird, Shaun Fraser, Joe Richardson, Ülgen Semerci, Çağlar Tahiroğlu, and aims to discuss the neologism of newcomers for these noncitizen immigrants while re-questioning the concepts such as identity, mobility and trilogy of state-nation-territory from a dialectic contribution.

The preview taking place on the 5th of June, Saturday 6.30 - 8.30 pm at the London Lighthouse Gallery. Come and say hi! For more information please e-mail artelsewherelondon@gmail.com