What's Up - Your guide to what's happening in Fayetteville, AR this week!
Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/1201092
JANUARY 19-25, 2020 WHAT'S UP! 11 BENTONVILLE Naomi Safran-Hon, an Israeli artist living in New York, gives a presentation about her work during the opening reception for the "Refuge" exhibit at 21c Museum Hotel in Bentonville. (NWA Democrat-Gazette/Ben Goff) "I hope the viewer questions what is real and what is fake," Safran-Hon reveals. "Because the cement is a factual material, but then the photograph is a representation of the material. So then what is truth and what is fiction in that? Which one is the truth? And which one is the creation of that myth?" (NWA Democrat-Gazette/Ben Goff) offered shelter, comfort, home. "The home is something that we all have a relationship to. Whether you live in northern Arkansas, or you live in Palestine or Israel or Puerto Rico or Canada, we all have a relationship to that space," Safran-Hon reasons. "And we all sometimes take it for granted, especially if it's not disputed, especially if we always had a home and will always have a home. "We never think about those four walls. We don't think about the plumbing. We don't think about the electricity. These things only come up when we lose them. Then we start understanding how fragile our lives are and how everything is so interconnected and that we take it for granted." "Where are you welcome? Because home is where you're welcome," Stites muses. "One of the important points of the exhibition is looking at this vast range of experiences, and what happens in a world of increasing displacement and civil strife and environmental crisis. "More and more people have to consider the potential for becoming refugees or accepting refugees or thinking about what that means," she goes on, "and what that means in terms of human rights and the desire for human dignity. How we value life as the world becomes smaller, as we live in a global society, the displacement of people all across the globe is an important issue to consider no matter how and where we live." The exhibition also includes work by a Peruvian artist critiquing the power and futility of the Department of Homeland Security; an Irish photographer using heat mapping to render the haunting realities of refugee camps in Greece and Turkey; a Vietnamese artist pulling from his own refugee experience; a South African film director investigating the impact of the slave trade and racial violence; and many other pieces exploring myriad situations of displacement. "I'm interested, myself, in the story specifically [of this neighborhood], but I think for an audience, it doesn't really matter the details" of the place, Safran- Hon says, returning to her work. "The specific history of what happened in Wadi Salib is the history of war, of economic disparity, of gentrification, of urban neglect. The story is particular to Israel — I can tell you this happened here and that happened there — but it's a human story. It's a story that we see in many different places. And I think that's why I was attracted to it. Because I was able, through these images, to find a process that really talked to the heart of what I was interested in." See more works from the exhibition on Page 40.