Dual(national)ity

Photo series with text, German/​English

15 images (6044cm, alto­gether 9 metres) UV Direct print on 3mm Dibond Butlerfinish aluminium (D)

Insur­ance value 50015 = 7500 Euros

Dual(national)ity was first presented as a perfor­mance with slides 2000, then shown in printed format as 8 A2 posters (4259.4 cm) in 2002.

The Dual(national)ity images have been taken from a post­card distrib­uted by the German govern­ment, about the new citi­zen­ship laws intro­duced on the 1st of January 2000. Featured on the post­card are Soon-Sa C.’, a South-Korean woman, who has lived in Germany for 12 years and her German’-looking boyfriend. The logo on the card is: Typisch Deutsch’ (Typi­cally German). The intended message is that she like he, may now claim her right to German citi­zen­ship. But we have been told only a part of the story. In an added narra­tive, inte­grated into the pictures, the artist Tanya Ury reveals an unex­pected twist in the tale around the making of the post­card, in German and then in English.

Typisch Deutsch” (typi­cally German) in big letters, jumps provoca­tively out at us from the images of the Dual(nation)ality photo­series. It is a frag­ment of a story that Tanya Ury tells on aluminium plates, alto­gether nine metres in length. A contin­uous text pursues real events, a chance conver­sa­tion sparked of by a post­card adver­tising the Schroeder government’s new citi­zen­ship laws of 2000. Ury varies the enlarged post­card motif, a double portrait of a mixed couple”, an Asian woman and a supposed German, until their facial expres­sions lose a certain concise­ness. The polit­ical campaign as well as clas­si­fi­ca­tions of nation­ality become ever more ques­tion­able. The artist, creator of many videos, demon­strates here also filmic qual­i­ties: the shim­mering surface of the aluminium, the zoom, the linear plot. In passing she mentions the priv­i­lege of her dual national status and thereby suggests her familial fate as a Jewess, a theme that threads through all her works.

Susanne Grube, Curator Künstler­forum Bonn 2005

Ury’s photog­raphy cycle Dual(nationa)lity present a crit­ical and subver­sive take on the construc­tion of citi­zen­ship and its repre­sen­ta­tion in the adver­tise­ment campaign that German govern­ment launched to promote German citi­zen­ship for foreigners.”

Pablo Markin Musrara Mix art festival: German artists, Europe and Jerusalem. Wednesday, July 1 2009 By pbmarkin

space­and­cul­ture­be­yondt…

Infor­ma­tion 

German trans­la­tion Tanya Ury and Rolf Steiner 

Digital computer work David Janecek



Presen­ta­tion

2000 As perfor­mance, Heimat Kunst, House of World Cultures, Berlin (D)

2000 As perfor­mance, Centre for German-Jewish Studies, Sussex Univer­sity (GB)

2000 As perfor­mance, Hildesheim Univer­sity (D)

2000 As perfor­mance, Aesthetik 1,2,3, 68Elf Galerie, Photo­scene, Cologne (D)

2002 As perfor­mance, Migra­tion, Arbeit und Geschlecht (Migra­tion, Work and Gender), congress, Berlin (D)

2002 Group exhi­bi­tion, in poster form, Europe Beyond Borders, City of Women, Mednar­odni Graficini Likovni Center, Ljubl­jana (SL)

2003 As perfor­mance, Power and Respon­si­bility, Bet Debora confer­ence, Berlin (D)

2004 Group exhi­bi­tion, in poster form, Sarah-Hagar: Reli­gion, Poli­tics, Gender. Inter-reli­gious/­cul­tural Project, Berlin (D)

2005 (18.9. – 2.10.) Group exhi­bi­tion, Dual(national)ity dibond images, Contact — Context, Künstler­forum Bonn (D)

2009 (2527.5) A2 paper prints, MusraraMix Festival 9 Foreign Works from Germany” in Queen Heleni Street, Jerusalem (IL)

www​.goethe​.de/​i​n​s​/il/j…

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