Installation pays tribute to lives uprooted
We cannot help seeing the images on television or in print: Thousands trudging along country roads, carrying their few belongings, or straining to climb fences or slide under razor wire, having trekked from Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan or from Sudan or Libya and crossed in unsafe little boats the danger-fraught seas.
This is the massive influx of refugees and migrants that threatens to destabilize Europe even more than the Greek financial crisis, funneling through the unwelcoming Balkans in a blind attempt to reach France, Germany, Great Britain or the Scandinavian countries, the wealthier nations that seem to hold out promise of a better life. The response in Europe to this flood of desperation and misery has been consternation and confusion, except in Hungary, where the resolute government is building a 100-mile fence along its border with Serbia. Can the solution to this burgeoning tide be that simple?
Even more than the 20th century, the 21st century is becoming a history of displacement, of movement, of asylum-seeking and vast refugee camps, as hordes of people flee from oppression, torture, civil war, slaughter and execution, carrying what they can, a few household objects, items of clothing, a precious memento carefully wrapped and hidden. Those migrations and those packs and parcels serve as the inspiration for the devastating installation “The Season Moved,” created and assembled by Gil Ngolé, a native of the Republic of Congo who will receive his master of fine arts degree from Memphis College of Art in December.
Java Cabana, The exhibition will be displayed through Oct. 3 at Tops Gallery.
Ngolé is a night wanderer, walking the streets of the city and harvesting myriad and diverse discarded objects and materials that he wraps in fabric, paper and plastic sheeting, along with foam rubber and plastic foam, daubs with pigment and sometimes inserts moss, and then ties everything in packages with twine, rope, ribbon, swagging and other forms of fastener. He performs these actions quickly, as if impelled by a sense of risk and emergency, as if he has but minutes to flee before an invading army breaks down the door. Each package — there are 200 of them in the installation, and they are all different — feels like a mystery, because viewers have no idea what is inside them.
Piling these wrapped pieces of junk randomly — or perhaps not so randomly — in the main gallery at Tops, Ngolé has assembled the flotsam and jetsam of capitalism and consumerism, the graveyard of possessions and memories, the detritus of abandoned hopes and lives. Never before has this small industrial space so much resembled a dungeon or torture chamber, a way-station to a Circle of Hell. At the same time, the artist reminds us that aesthetic choices were made here, however spontaneously, that any object may be imbued with significance, even artistic fervor, where the weight of intentionality and decisionmaking take precedence. The found object may yet be a sacred vessel.
In the smaller room at Tops, the antechamber, as it were, Ngolé has two “paintings,” at least flattish, vertical works of ragged shabby fabric tied and stretched inside a framework of raw 2-by-4s slathered with acrylic paint. These could be works of art; they could be the walls or roof of a makeshift shelter in a crowded transient camp.
The third element of the installation is a sound construction whose constant iteration of static and misheard voices keeps communication just out of reach and irritation very much at the circumference of perception.
The exhibition title “The Season Moved” refers to the vast migration of people the artist witnessed during the Second Republic of the Congo Civil War in 1997. Regardless of its personal and historical background, the exhibition attains a sense of universality — anonymous and particular simultaneously — in the face of our young century’s horrendous depredations. It’s one of the most important exhibitions of the year.