Photo series with text, German/English
15 images (60 x 44cm, altogether 9 metres) UV Direct print on 3mm Dibond Butlerfinish aluminium (D)
Insurance value 500 x 15 = 7500 Euros
Dual(national)ity was first presented as a performance with slides 2000, then shown in printed format as 8 A2 posters (42 x 59.4 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
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 (25−27.5) A2 paper prints, MusraraMix Festival 9 “Foreign Works from Germany” in Queen Heleni Street, Jerusalem (IL)