South Bank, London, 19.05.2011
The Lion & the Unicorn is an installation created by Gitta Gschwendtner, in collaboration with young poets from The Refugee Council, The Refugee Youth, The Refugee Home School Support Project, and The Klevis Kola Foundation, as well as the poets Joelle Taylor, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Philip Wells, and Yemisi Blake. It has been exhibited at the Southbank Centre, and happens to be the most interesting artwork I have seen for quite some time.
The installation combines audio and visual elements; its main rectangular section is structured as a display of printed poems by young people from refugee organisations across London, and includes recordings of their voices reading out their works. The birds made out of paper, spreading out between the surrounding buildings on strings, complement the main structure with an additional element of dynamism; and in effect, turn the sky into a part of the project. The work is conceptually strong and imaginative; the installation itself and its subject matter fuse harmoniously in what may be read as a narrative portraying the printed and spoken words of refugees as they literally (poems) and metaphorically (birds) enter the public sphere.
South Bank, London, 19.05.2011
The work makes reference to the 1951 Lion and Unicorn Pavilion, which included a flight of ceramic birds, symbolising migration and freedom of speech. The Pavilion’s title aimed to represent the British character: the lion stood for realism and strength, and the unicorn for independence and imagination – both creatures have also been traditional emblems of the country. As the installation thus revisits and reinterprets such core concepts, I would like to return to Jacques Rancière’s pivotal work The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (Continuum, 2004).
Rancière insightfully addresses the relationship between art and politics as one involving articulation; as politics in his view centres “around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time” (p. 13), the installation may be seen as a discursively open and inclusive realm with regard to the rearticulation of national identity. Its location is of key importance, in that the artwork addresses the public in a political sense; it potentially concerns the citizenry, rather than only those who may purposefully visit a museum or a gallery exhibition. And in this respect, the work fully displays the merits of art in public places.
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