The work
of the South African, New York based artist, Vivienne Koorland, evokes
the pain and dislocation of migration and exile, and the dreams and fantasies
of that mythical place we call 'home'.
Africa remains a
key reference point in her work. So too does Eastern Europe. Koorland's
mother is a Polish born Jewish holocaust survivor. But while registering
personal experience, the work is not autobiographical. Indeed travel, transportation,
journeying and dislocation is so much part of modern experience that Koorland's
work draws on a wide range of cultural references and sources - children's
drawings from war-torn Europe, poetry written by the Austrian poet Friederike
Mayrocker, extracts from the journals of Joseph Roth, lists of butterfly
names compiled by Vladimir Nabokov or phrases culled from Sigmund Freud
and others.
Maps, grids and lists
often form the basis of her paintings, operating as metaphors and models
of imaginative reconstruction. Certain motifs recur - the hand-stiched
canvasses that form their own kind of map, a childlike drawing of a house,
a railway wagon or cattle truck that has become an iconic image of European
history, an aeroplane that promises escape or threatens destruction, foreign
words that jostle against each other, the references to war.
Covering a broad
sweep of European history, factual and imagined, Koorlandís paintings
evoke personal journeys and social displacements that resonate uniquely
with the house that became Freudís last home.
A catalogue to accompany
the exhibition includes an interview by Mark Godfrey with the artist, articles
by Adrian Rifkin and William Kentridge and an essay by the curator, Tamar
Garb.
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