CCFT
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Johan Sandborg, Duncan Higgins, Bente Irminger, Linda H. Lien, andy lock, Ana Souto Galvan, Susan Brind, Shauna McMullan, Yiorgos Hadjichristou, Jim Harold, DÁNIEL PÉTER BIRÓ
connected to: Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
As we move towards the first quarter of the third millennium, the impermanent and shifting influence of globalisation, economic division, migratory encounters, social media, historic narrative and tourism is having a major impact in our understanding of the making, belonging and occupying of place. It is widely documented that these conditions are contributing to a growing sense of displacement and alienation in what constitutes as place making, occupying, and belonging.
CCFT is asking how interdisciplinary artistic research practices contribute and share new critical understandings to aid this evolving understanding of place making, belonging and occupying?
The Truth in Painting 1993: The World Trade Center Bombers
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Martin Lang
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
1993 was the year of the first Islamist terrorist attack on American soil. The World Trade Center was bombed on the twentieth anniversary of its construction. Most of the bombers were apprehended and now reside in US maximum security prisons (you can check which prison houses who online). Some have since died of natural causes.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is currently in Guantanamo Bay for his role in the 9/11 attack. He was not initially charged with the 1993 attack, but confessed to masterminding it. During his interrogation by the CIA, Mohammed was subjected to waterboarding more than 180 times. He is generally believed to have bankrolled the 1993 bombing, but his nephew, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, is believed to have masterminded it. Yousef was also implicated in the 1993 Benazir Bhutto assassination attempt. Abdul Rahman Yasin is the only convicted WTC bomber to escape justice. The Iraqi authorities informed the Americans of his capture and that he had crucial information regarding the bombing. Inexplicably, the US did not respond, and he was subsequently released (he remains on the FBI most wanted list).
The Twin Towers, representing global trade, were a symbolic target for religious indignation long before 9/11. Could the bombing have been a religious rejection of the New World Order described above?
The Truth in Painting 1993: Runaway Train
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Martin Lang
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
In 1993, Soul Asylum released Runaway Train, which became a global hit. The music video featured real-life missing children taken from the “milk carton kids” campaign. It quoted the statistic that there were over one million youth lost on the streets of America. I always wondered what happened to the missing children in the music video. When a child goes missing, something has happened to them, and it is at least hypothetically possible to find out what (the truth is out there). Originally, I set out to create a piece of investigative art that would shed some light on the whereabouts of these children, but I ended up painting their portraits. Painting is a way of lifting normalised stories of tragedy into the heightened position of portraiture – ordinarily reserved for people in positions of power. These forgotten kids were unceremoniously eulogised on milk cartons because abductions in 1993 were so ordinary that Americans consumed them while eating their cereal.
Soul Asylum made different music videos for the different countries in which they released their single: I concentrated on the missing people from the British version. Tragically, many have been found dead. In one case, a child was located because of the video and returned to his parents: he later blamed the video for returning him to the abusive domestic situation from which he had being trying to escape. Some have been found alive; more are missing presumed dead. Because 1993 was pre-internet (indeed, pre-digital), the amount of information about each missing person available on the web varies greatly. Perhaps the most heart-breaking discovery from this research was that one child’s parents continue to be extremely active – resulting in continuous police activity, local newspaper coverage and even offering a reward for information leading to the whereabouts of their daughter's body – while another missing person has no information about him at all on the web or in local newspaper archives.