Amira Hanafi: We are fragmented
Title:
- We are fragmented
Artist(s) and People Involved:
Exhibiting Artist(s):
Symposium:
Creation Year:
- 2017
Medium:
- Digital artwork
Art Event Affiliation:
- Centre for Applied Human Rights
Artist Statement:
We are fragmented invites us to consider our methods for arranging and organizing information, and the differences and similarities between a sociological and an aesthetic approach. The work consists of a modeling of data previously obtained through research at the crossroads of the humanities and legal sciences. This survey by the Centre for Applied Human Rights aimed to collect, in the form of interviews, the testimonies of several human rights activists in different at-risk countries (Colombia, Kenya, Mexico, Indonesia, Egypt). Hanafi reuses this material for artistic purposes, who created a data bank allowing us to read the testimonies and navigate between them according to different classification criteria: geographic or affective.
The archiving is carried out while refraining from reducing personal experiences to an informational heap that is only meaningful in terms of accumulation. This characteristic of the work—maintaining the irreducible complexity of the experiences while granting a broad overview—places us, as spectators, in the active posture of a “researcher” as we navigate through the scattered excerpts according to an arbitrary and non-linear path.
