Collections Building
Part 5 of the photo tour of Sharjah Biennial 11: Re:emerge. Towards a New Cultural Cartography, 13 March - 13 May 2013. Curator: Yuko Hasegawa. More than 100 participants.
For an optimal view of our website, please rotate your tablet horizontally.
Gamsutl. 2012
Colour HD video projection (16 min 1 sec, looped)
In her work, Taus Makhacheva questions the unstable boundary between similarity and difference, acceptance and rejection, drawing attention to our efforts to merge, mimic, assimilate or leak into what is other, whether it be a person or a community, natural or social, rural or urban, real or imagined. In Gamsutl, named after the ancient Avarian settlement carved out of the mountains in Dagestan, a man walks among the picturesque ruins, reenacting poses from Franz Roubaud’s late nineteenth-century paintings of the Caucasian War (1817-64) as well as steps from the "Dance of the Collective Farm Brigade Leader", a 1930s North Ossetian dance that combines ethnic folk elements with aspects of the Soviet socialist experience.
© Still: Taus Makhacheva
Repro: Haupt & Binder
© Text: SB11 Guidebook
Part 5 of the photo tour of Sharjah Biennial 11: Re:emerge. Towards a New Cultural Cartography, 13 March - 13 May 2013. Curator: Yuko Hasegawa. More than 100 participants.