Port City exhibition at the Arnolfini, Bristol
The Guardian, Wednesday September 19, 2007
By Elisabeth Mahoney
A couple of fruit flies were already circling on the opening day of this large, ambitious exhibition, drawn to the gallery by one vast exhibit made of sugar – Meschac Gaba’s gleaming model of an imaginary city, fringed by desert and featuring some of the world’s most iconic buildings in miniature – and another involving some rotting onions.
But there is something here for all tastes, inside Arnolfini and also spilling out into the city beyond. This is the show’s strongest point, the way in which it includes and references Bristol’s history as a port city tangled up with the history of trade and slavery, but keeps a resolutely international focus as it looks at issues of migration, mobility, global commerce and local survival. Ursula Biemann’s riveting ground-floor installation of photographs and documentary video depicts the desperate plight of migrants traversing the Sahara and then the sea, both inhospitable and merciless. But more surprisingly, she also reveals how these new patterns of mobility have given the desert, and especially the nomadic tribes who know it best, a new lease of commercial life.
Other highlights include Zineb Sedira’s evocative video, Saphir, filmed in Algiers and framed by the shimmering indigo sea, with its promise of faraway possibility, and Melanie Jackson’s paper models of the goods, rubbish and scavengers on Branscombe beach after the wrecking of the MSC Napoli. There is warm-hearted mirth, too, in Erik van Lieshout’s video installation, hidden away in a cardboard shack, in which he visits Ghana to find the roots of hip-hop and finds instead just how hard it is to rap. The result is a dynamic exhibition of impressive breadth, full of life and, unexpectedly, hope, right on the water’s edge in a port city that quietly keeps on changing.