As part of the exhibition “Visions of Transcendence: Creating Space in East and West” Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll together with artists and criminologists of the Immigration Detention Archive shows a new video work entitled End Smoke. The video is set in the courtyard of Colnbrook Immigration Removal Center, which is just behind London’s largest Heathrow airport and is where people are detained indeterminately awaiting deportation from the UK. The stories the detainees told me demanded to be retold publicly but required anonymization. In the montage of material I portray their subjective experience as it was shared also between different people in similar ways. After giving workshops on photography and video making and having permission to use my cameras inside this highly secured prison environment, the management decided that they would censor my material for fear of it representing them in a bad light. This censorship of my video material led me to create 80 still frames from one take of an anonymous detainee walking in circles smoking a cigarette in the courtyard. These stills I turned into slides and put on a carousel which also goes in circles, the way the man and time were going indeterminately in circles. The loss of hope and sense of time quickly descended upon most detainees that I spoke to inside these places, where, although the schedule is extremely regulated, any agency to determine the future is not. For the purposes of this exhibition the slide film has been digitized. It includes layers of material from the archive of immigration detention that I collected during my residency there in 2015-16.
Catalogue: https://issuu.com/wendemuseum/docs/wende_visionsoftranscendencecatalog_final_240319
Reviews: UCLA Johanna Drucker piece:
https://johannadrucker.substack.com/p/visions-of-transcendence-creating
William Poundstone, LACMA on Fire:
https://lacmaonfire.blogspot.com/2023/12/visions-of-transcendence-in-culver-city.html
LA Times:
https://www.latimes.com/travel/list/culver-city-neighborhood-guide-things-to-do
Hyperallergic:
https://hyperallergic.com/847524/10-art-shows-to-see-in-los-angeles-fall-2023/
Visions of Transcendence highlights the resilience and creative power of people deprived of their own place to live. The exhibition presents artwork and photography from incarcerated and unhoused persons from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe as well as from the United States and Western Europe, reflecting on the parallels and differences between two competing political systems. Irrespective of ideological regimes, incarcerated and unhoused artists have created and continue to create their own visionary space with powerful artwork.
Featured artists include
Charles Bado, Gil Batle, Willie Battle, Sandow Birk, Jennifer Blake, Christian Branscombe, Gary Brown, Mihail Chemiakin, Manuel Compito, Sidney Davis, Eugene Clark El, Michael Moses El, Solomon Gershov, Dean Gillispie, Alan Glover, Ezequiel González, Michael D. Griego, Lev Kropivnitsky, Leonid Lamm, Linda Leigh, Boris Mikhailov, Omid Mokri, Stanislav Molodykh, Leonid Nedov, Delores New, M. Nguyen, Monica Nouwens, Sean O’Brien, Kitiona Paepuele, People of the Golden Venture, J. Quintero, Karen Ruckman, Bernard Seaborn, Shepard Sherbell, Marlen Shpindler, Boris Sveshnikov, Victoria Tedesco, Bumdog Torres, “Duck” Roy Turrentine, Tamás Urbán, Maks Velo, Rigo Veloso, Peter Villapudua, Obie Weathers, Kenneth Webb, Vladimir Yakovlev, and Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll.