Continental Rifts: Muxima At The Museum

Alfredo Jaar, Muxima (2005), still from digital film

Continental Rifts is an art exhibition currently on show at the Fowler Museum in LA.

"It explores time-based media — video, film, and related photography — and considers ways in which new media lend themselves to the representation of complex identity negotiations resulting from transnational movement, shifting notions of “home” and “abroad,” and deep emotional attachments and divides. The works raise the question “Whose Africa?” by considering issues of geology, geography, botany, war, memory, exile, and loss. In the process, national and continental boundaries become blurred as lived experience and remembered pasts defy such arbitrary divides."

It features, among other works, Muxima, 2005, by Alfredo Jaar, who was born in Chile and in recent years has worked in Rwanda and Angola:
"In ten exquisitely composed and luminous "cantos" shot in Angola on a musical ground of the popular song Muxima ("My Soul"), Alfredo Jaar renders visions of inseparable horror and beauty. Close-up frames annihilate any possible distance from the subjects' predicament amidst vestiges of colonialism and war, oil drilling and the progress of AIDS, all contained and countered by rituals of daily life, the promise of youth, gestures of grace, the dignified gaze of elders, and nature's vast continuity."

More details here , here and here.

{You can listen to the song Muxima here}

Alfredo Jaar, Muxima (2005), still from digital film

Continental Rifts is an art exhibition currently on show at the Fowler Museum in LA.

"It explores time-based media — video, film, and related photography — and considers ways in which new media lend themselves to the representation of complex identity negotiations resulting from transnational movement, shifting notions of “home” and “abroad,” and deep emotional attachments and divides. The works raise the question “Whose Africa?” by considering issues of geology, geography, botany, war, memory, exile, and loss. In the process, national and continental boundaries become blurred as lived experience and remembered pasts defy such arbitrary divides."

It features, among other works, Muxima, 2005, by Alfredo Jaar, who was born in Chile and in recent years has worked in Rwanda and Angola:
"In ten exquisitely composed and luminous "cantos" shot in Angola on a musical ground of the popular song Muxima ("My Soul"), Alfredo Jaar renders visions of inseparable horror and beauty. Close-up frames annihilate any possible distance from the subjects' predicament amidst vestiges of colonialism and war, oil drilling and the progress of AIDS, all contained and countered by rituals of daily life, the promise of youth, gestures of grace, the dignified gaze of elders, and nature's vast continuity."

More details here , here and here.

{You can listen to the song Muxima here}