MultipleCity, Panama 2003 (Fundacion
Arte Panama)
Excerpted from ArtNexus.com
Timed to coincide with the nation’s centennial, MultipleCity
presented a radical new vision of art as social praxis. The
exhibition featured fourteen local and international artists,
all of whom tailored new works to the physical and cultural
realities of Panama City.
Local artists and intellectuals have struggled for years against
a lack of forward-looking institutions in Panama. The inspiration
of MultipleCity curators Adrienne Samos and Gerardo Mosquera
was to treat this lack not as an obstacle but as an advantage.
Their de-centralized curatorial method made use of the local
scene’s open-endedness: instead of being directed from
above, international artists worked alongside local artists,
capitalizing on this pool of specialized knowledge to tailor
their work to the city’s unique micro-politics. In return,
many locals — engineers, architects, bus painters —
received a first-hand course in groundbreaking art.
Construction on the canal — originally started by the
French, who brought in Chinese laborers in the mid-19th century,
and continued later by the Americans, who imported Jamaicans
and other West Indians — contributed to Panama’s
astonishingly diverse cultural mosaic. These immigrants’
multivalent identity is the subject of Chinese-Canadian artist
Gu Xiong’s mixed media installation, I Am Who I Am.
Xiong interviewed members of the local Chinese community, some
of whose families have resided in Panama for over a century,
and ultimately hung photos of these interviewees, overlaid with
their quotes, on brightly colored banners above a main thoroughfare
running through the city’s Chinatown. It was a potent
reminder of the multiplicity that gave MultipleCity its inspiration,
a reminder that nothing is simple in the city of the twenty-first
century.
The artist worked closely with the Chinese-Panamanian community
in an installation that fused personal experiences with public
art. Near Chinatown, the big banners and multicolored ribbons
hung from one side to the other of a populous street, recalling
the Chinese festival tradition. Each one of these banners displayed
a photograph of a person, accompanied by words that spoke about
an aspect of his or her identity, repeated in Spanish, Chinese
and English.
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I am Who I am, mixed media installation,
Panama City
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