LACE: A Photo Gallery

 

Whitney Jackson

11/11/08

Cancelled Without Prejudice

On Saturday, November 08, 2008, Ismail Farouk led a small group of individuals through the MAK Center’s Schindler House for his show Canceled Without Prejudice. Ismail Farouk uses six of the rooms in the Schindler house to examine six urban sites in Johannesburg, South Africa and Los Angeles’ downtown Skid Row. Farouk’s work plays with the notion of interrogating space to uncover social inequalities, the impact of globalization and spatial injustices. He draws close parallels to these injustices taking place in South Africa and right here in Los Angeles.

Upon entering the Schindler house in the Clyde Chance Studio, Farouk uses the space of the restroom for his video Occupied Please Wait. In his video he placed a camera in one of the Automatic Public Toilets on Skid Row capturing the cleaning mode of the toilet to comment on the way that society is becoming more streamlined where machines are taking the place of people. In the main studio Farouk’s piece Notice of Scheduled Cleanup comments on the dehumanizing way in which authorities are dealing with these homeless communities. In the image 7^th Street Storage Facility he shows us a check-in storage facility which provides storage for homeless people’s belongings, however critics call the facility a device used to clean the streets. The “storage devices” are in fact the same “storage devices” we use everyday to put our trash in and most of the time objects placed in these receptacles are placed there by someone else. Clearly theses people are not wanted and the city has set into place ways of pushing these people off the streets giving them no where else to go.

In the Rudolph Schindler Studio Farouk takes us to Joubert Park to examine the livelihood of the Trolley Pushers. Trolley Pushers are men who use stolen grocery carts (trolleys) as a service for transporting heavy baggage through the city. This activity creates much needed jobs in the city. The pushers are usually paid R5 per load and when these trolleys are confiscated because of the illegal nature in which they were obtained they are fined R300 by officials. Farouk held a protest in conjunction with the pushers as a way to “mobilize support for the formalization of a representative trolley association”. Since the protest and with the help of a German grant weekly meetings have been organized to further push the notion of formalizing these activities.

Although I’m sure the artist has put much thought into this project and made an attempt to acknowledge the temporality of the piece there are still a few unanswered questions remaining in my mind.  To take a stance coinciding with Claire Bishop, I must ask:  What is this piece really doing?  Ismail Farouk is showing a very small; privileged audience these injustices.  When you go to this beautiful location the meaning shifts.  The artist did ask us, his audience to challenge the notion of public and private space by trying to test the boundaries of the L.A. “storage facilities” by checking in our own belongings.  Let’s be real; how many of us are likely to pursue that?  This house is not accessible to the very subject it depicts.  Why not choose a gallery on 5th and Main near Skid Row to put these pieces? Let’s put them closer to home. Only, wait…the guard at the front of that gallery won’t let you in if you are homeless. People want to look at art, not the homeless.

To see a full tour please see the video below and visit: http://www.makcenter.org

-delaine

“CANCELLED WITHOUT PREJUDICE”

In the exhibit, “Cancelled Without Prejudice”, Ismail Farouk takes on topics of “social justice and globalization” in Johannesburg, South Africa.  His exhibition is held in the Schindler House in the MAK Center for Art and Architecture In West Hollywood.  It includes photographs and video art installations that cover trolley cart protests he organized in Johannesburg and also footage from Skid Row in Los Angeles.  The trolley cart protests are in regards to the business of people who make a living pushing shopping carts between places to transport heavy loads.  The shopping carts are stolen from chain supermarkets rendering the activity illegal.  When they are caught, usually on fridays, they are charged upwards of 300 Rand (10 Rand to the US dollar) and put in jail for the weekend.  It is a difficult life and people are forced into it as there are not many ways to make enough money to support oneself in South Africa.  He also looks at the issue of police corruption and migration rights.  He has footage of police accepting bribes from people they abduct off the street and threaten to send back to their country if they don’t pay them.  Farouk is concerned with human rights and protecting what it is that makes us human.

“The title of the exhibition comes from Farouk’s visa, issued by the United States so that he could travel for the MAK Center’s international fellowship program, the Urban Future Initiative.  ’Cancelled without prejudice’ is a designation that enables detainment-free entry at a US border.  It implicitly points to its opposite, the existence of ‘prejuedice,’ or pre-judgment, which is a growing phenomenon in the immigration policy of the U.S. and other nations”.

Ismail Farouk also addressed the issue of the upcoming World Cup in 2010 that will be taking place in Johannesburg and how the country is sinking money into making transportation available for the tourists, yet neglecting its own citizens.  

WHITNEY JACKSON

11.9.08