My Country

ABOUT THE SHOW

There is much wrapped up in reflecting upon about one’s own country—memory, patriotism, childhood, identity. What is exactly is one’s country? For artists working in New York the question can be even more complex. There’s your country of origin, your country of residence, the country of your parents. There’s the place you were born and the place you consider home. The very word “country” can conjure up complicated emotions that are often difficult and challenging but can also be delightfully evocative and even enlightening.

Transforming the Hungarian Cultural Center into a series of winding corridors and intimate rooms, Ms. Dezsö and Ms. Koizumi take visitors on a physical and psychological journey that is at times comic and unsettling. Both artists are careful and diligent crafters, creating beautiful and delicate objects that are so almost in spite of their quotidian materials. Weaving through their respective works, viewers will come to points of collaboration between the two artists, as the “borders”, so-to-speak, become blurred.

As My Country presents Ms. Dezsö’s and Ms. Koizumi’s thoughtful perspectives on their countries, it encourages viewers to reflect upon their own given homelands.

GUEST ARTISTS

My Country will feature additional established New York artists responding to the theme of “country” during the run of the show. All events will take place at the Hungarian Cultural Center and admission is free.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Andrea Dezsö was born in Transylvania and is ethnic Hungarian. She has resided in New York since 1997. Dezsö has shown her work at the Jack Tilton Gallery, The New York Armory Show, Art Basel Miami, Flux Factory, Galapagos, and her work has been included in prestigious public and private collections. “Community Garden” Dezsö’s large-scale public art mosaic commissioned by the MTA Arts for Transit has been recently installed in NYC in the Bedford Park Boulevard subway station on the # 4 line. Dezsö’s art has been published in The New York Times and on the cover of visual design magazine Print.

Dezsö’s illustrated original fiction, “Mamushka” has been published in the art magazine Esopus, and “Names in a Book in Random Order” appeared in the leading alternative comic publication Blab. The literary journal McSweeney’s featured a series of short stories she wrote drawing from her experiences growing up in Romania. A book about Dezsö’s art, creative process and obsessions titled “Andrea Dezsö Fetish Book” was published in 2006 by Publikum.

Andrea Dezsö is an Assistant Professor of Media Design at Parsons The New School for Design in New York City. She has also taught at City College, The Hungarian University of Design, The American Museum of Visionary Art, and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. www.andreadezso.com

Luminitza collects the green, star-shaped bellybuttons of oranges. She keeps them in a shoebox which she shakes every now and then to hear their bellybutton music. She says that her father works for the Securitate. They have special stores, people who work for the Securitate, in buildings unmarked from the outside where they enter using secret passes, where oranges, candy bars, and bananas are sold. We are afraid of Luminitza because if she doesn't like you her father can make a phone call, and he can get your parents disappear one day on their way to work, never to come home again, so we swear to give her all the bellybuttons we come by, even the ones we find on the street, but I haven't seen oranges for years and I never find anything valuable on the streets, yet in my dreams I sit under enormous, fragrant, blossoming orange trees in a faraway land filling my pockets with green, star-shaped bellybuttons for Luminitza…

---from Andrea Dezsö’s “The Numbers”, McSweeney's issue 12

Miwa Koizumi was born and raised in Japan. Married to a French-American, she primarily speaks French at her home in Brooklyn. Before moving to New York in 2001, she studied in France for 5 years and in Bali, Indonesia with a group of Ethnographic Researchers.

Koizumi received an MFA from Tama Art-University in Japan, and the DNSAP from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where she was honored with the Multimedia Prize upon graduation. Recently she has been studying the pidgin cultures resulting from the clash between the innumerable small tribes present in New York City.

Miwa Koizumi has exhibited internationally in Japan, France, and the USA. Recently at ISE Foundation, Redux Contemporary Art Center, Flux Factory, NGC244, Goliath Visual Space, Corcoran College, Gallerie Caisse des Depots, Chateau d'Oiron, ENSBA, and Parco Gallery. www.miwa.metm.org

In 1989, I was a student in Japan. Our emperor changed, the Second World War criminal was replaced, and I remember thinking, “I'm living in a really nice moment when I don’t know any fear”. At the same time, I saw the Romanian Revolution on TV and all of Eastern Europe shouting and moving. I couldn't understand how people could shout out so much emotion and how so much human energy could move people forward. So I decided to see with my own eyes Romania, Hungary, the new Czech Republic, and East Germany. This was my first trip to another country. I took a ticket on the Russian airline Aeroflot and my journey started in the Red Square in Moscow at night without a passport because the Soviet Border Guards kept the passports of all the travelers in transit.

---quote from Miwa Koizumi on My Country

ABOUT THE GUEST ARTISTS

Coco Fusco is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist and writer. She has performed, lectured, exhibited and curated around the world since 1988. She is the author of English is Broken Here (The New Press, 1995), The Bodies That Were Not Ours and Other Writings (Routledge/inIVA, 2001) and the editor of Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (Routledge, 1999) and Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (Abrams, 2003). Fusco is a recipient of a 2003 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. She is an associate professor in the Visual Arts Division of Columbia University’s School of the Arts. www.cocofusco.com

LeeSaar The Company was established in Israel in 2000 by the actress and writer Lee Sher and The Dancer/Choreographer Saar Harari. The company uses the different disciplines and training of Theater and Dance to create original theater and dance performances. The company members are from England, Germany, Italy, the United States and Israel. In 2004, after a residency in Sydney, Australia, and two seasons in Tel Aviv, the company moved to NYC where it is currently based. Performance Space 122 commissioned and presented the new work of the company "Herd Of Bulls” on October 2005 and in January 2006. Following these two successful seasons and great reviews from the NY Times and the New Yorker, the company has been invited to create new work for a long run at Performance space 122. (September-October 2006)

Dasha Shishkin was born in Moscow and resides in New York City. She received an MFA at Columbia University and shows with Grimm Rosenfeld Gallery. Dasha Shishkin has shown her work internationally and recently appeared in PS1’s Greater New York show. www.grimmrosenfeld.com