No Man’s Land

The project No Man’s Land invites 65 participants from diverse locations and backgrounds to utilise cyber space as the primary platform to present works addressing the territorially imagined line of the border, its powers of inclusion and exclusion, and its ability to simultaneously promote both unity and conflict.

An initiative of Bangkok-based collective Womanifesto, No Man’s Land creates a kind of web gallery where visitors entering the site can scroll down a list of participants’ names and choose to view a specific work. Works include short video pieces, single or multiple still images, sound pieces and text. The site will also include a web-board where participating artists and site visitors can post comments about the work or any other related issues. Active since May 2006, the project will continue to develop and evolve as participants up-load their work throughout the year. It is hoped that the project will be widely accessible online to a diverse range of people in numerous locations.

In light of the current global political situation, where borders and the nations they contain are so evangelistically defended and too often bloodily contested, co-curators Varsha Nair and Katherine Olston decided to mount a project reflecting these issues. All one needs to do is turn on the television, pick up a paper, listen to a story of a family member or friend, or even just to step out your own front door to be reminded of the effects of nationalism on our lives. Furthermore, the project aims to establish a forum to generate intellectual exchange and communicate and raise awareness of other related experiences, creating a flow of information about how different social institutions, economic systems, cultures, religions and ethnicities co-exist in contemporary society.

Borders possess the capacity to create a sense of belonging and security, yet they also often promote a homogeneous idea of identity and cultural value and therefore often may not allow for diversity, resulting in nationalistic narratives often being superimposed over ethnically diverse groups of people in an attempt to ignore or obliterate difference. In order then, to embrace and to acknowledge difference, participants from diverse locations and backgrounds were invited to partake in the project and asked to create pertinent works reflecting upon contemporary and personal experiences of nationalism. Whilst the project will evolve as new work is added, the work currently contained in the website already acts as a map, reflecting the range of personal experiences surrounding the issues afore mentioned.

Karla Sachse’s four-image documentation of a real installation in Berlin, entitled, “rabbits at no man’s land of THE WALL in Berlin” draws our attention to an era now past, to a space that was neither east nor west, a no-man’s land beneath the Berlin Wall where rabbits lived in burrows, oblivious to the politically-charged nature of the territory they occupied.

Built for perhaps similarly ambivalent creatures, ‘Babyklappe’ by Kai Kaljo provides us with a glimpse of a different kind of ‘no-man’s land’. Her eerie single, still image work shows us a picture taken at a hospital in Dortmund in 2006 of a special, purpose-built, baby-sized door where unwanted babies can be deposited, abandoned to the care of the hospital. The text accompanying the image reads, ‘On the right side, there are instructions in German, Polish and Turkish, that say once you put the baby in and close the window you cannot reopen the babyklappe anymore. Some pens and paper can be seen on the left side, for notes one may want to leave. The locals say it is a relatively new thing in Dortmund. Although not dealing directly with the physical site of the border, the work forces us to confront the implications of the displacement of peoples across borders as a result of warfare, persecution and/or financial hardship.

In a touching and multi-layered video work, ‘Great Expectations’ artist Renata Poljak takes us on a journey to her familial home in Split, a city on the shores of the Adriatic Sea in present day Croatia. The sunniest place in Europe, Split has recently been overcome with ostentatious holiday houses clustered around its coast. She narrates the story of her uncle, who upon inheriting the family home, promptly sells the land directly in front of his traditional old home for an immense profit. The new owners build a towering two-story mansion and the uncle thus forfeits his million-dollar view, having now only a view of the red tiles of the roof of the house in front. The video also includes a disturbing image of nationalistic football violence; Hajduk football fans setting fire to a car with the intent to burn its passenger alive. The work addresses concerns of property ownership and territory, and the way in which acts of violence may be committed under the guise of nationalistic ideals, no matter how misguided or malinformed they may be.

In bringing together such a volume of works (there are presently 65 artists contributing to the project) No Man’s Land presents an opportunity for participants and site visitors to explore and experience multiple view points surrounding the key issues of the project. Through the overlaying of sometimes radically different and at other times, startlingly similar points of view, No Man’s Land aims to challenge pre-existing notions surrounding nationalism and to highlight what it means to live in the increasingly globalised world of today.

From a curatorial perspective and considering the issue of borders, it is interesting to note the project has largely been administrated and curated over the internet. Participants were gathered through existing professional networks, and were invited to partake via email. As a co-curator to the project it has been interesting liaising with artists who I have never met, and perhaps never, in fact will meet. My relationship with them is purely online and I realise that I do not know their gender, their age, their accent, or their nationality. Moreover, Varsha (in Bangkok) and I communicate almost exclusively through email and thus it makes little difference to the project whether I am in Chiang Mai or Sydney. The curation/creation of the project happens, mostly within the borderless scape of cyber space, in yet another kind of no man’s land. Indeed, the no man’s land, in all its diversity, is a potent space deserving consideration in the increasingly globalised world of today.

Katherine Olston