Artificial Islands (Interior Archipelago) (19.01.2017)
(Exhibition, Festival, News, Residency, Video Art)
11 – 27 January 2017
Firstdraft Gallery
13-17 Riley Street Woolloomooloo, Sydney 2011
Artist Talk: 27 January, 6 – 7pm
Eugenia’s new work Artificial Islands (Interior Archipelago) is showing at firstdraft until 27 Jan 2017. AI(IA) is a manufactured landscape – a sand monument replica of the Palm Jumeirah, Dubai. Tracing a line from the mythic (and mostly male) earthworks and conceptual artists of the ‘70s – from Robert Smithson to Bas Jan Ader – to the territorial claims and artificial geographies of the South China Seas and Dubai, AI(IA) explores the power dynamics and politics at play in making and marking space. What does it look like to represent a site, a self, a culture or a state?
As Shumon Basar writes, Dubai is a ‘City from Zero’, the ultimate site of globalisation, hyper-capital and artificial ecology. Dubai is also one of the world’s most intense building sites: 12-hour construction shifts merge into unpaid overtime, 6-7 days a week, 365 days a year – only stopping for prayer time. Who builds paradise? Artificial Islands (Interior Archipelago) is built by local workers remunerated at the average daily rate of a Dubai construction worker* under the supervision of Eugenia Lim.