Review – UN.Known Spaces

On the evening of the 26th of June the events room at Goethe Institut was full yet unusually silent. People huddled around speaking quietly in groups or sitting in the middle of the room, staring transfixed at one of four screens, earphones covering their ears. By one wall three houseplants had electronic tablets strategically nestled inside their leaves that showed fast moving images of three different cities.

For Un.Known Worlds, two Berlin-based artists, Janina Janke and Maurice de Martin, set out to explore the worlds of 66 people around the United Nations headquarters in Vienna, New York, and Nairobi, by using an informal network of images, sounds, texts and objects. The interplay between individual microcosms and the macrocosm of this vast global organisation became the subject of their novel artistic experiment.

The artists were inspired by what they term as the phenomenon “Worlds inside the World” conceived by the French philosopher Michel Foucault. The exhibition offers powerful revelations about not only the UN, but also the self-imposed isolation of any organisation or group and the effects of this isolation on the community around it.

Conclusions made from the presentation suggest that the UN is like a Russian Matryoshka in that it has many cultures within one structure. It is, however, rare that members bother to integrate into the local community. This limited integration leads to a narrow understanding of the surrounding people who are often viewed through a prism of “otherness”.

The research is presented dynamically using mixed-media but leaves one asking for a more personal interpretation. The UN is not as captivating a topic as one would think, three interviews in and it is difficult to care anymore what people think of the UN. The interest piqued by the artistic experiment is in its revelations into the relationship between the ‘microcosm individual and the macrocosm global organisation’.

Kenya is host to many different cultures and communities; many are isolated while others enrich themselves and each other by integrating and learning from each other.

 

By Ondi Madete