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Art world
likes where he (Brendan Fernandes ) is coming from
http://www.thestar.com/printarticle/842925
August 01, 2010 | Murray Whyte
Artist Brendan Fernandes
shown with part of his Until We Fearless exhibit in
Hamilton, Ontario. TORONTO STAR/AARON HARRIS
HAMILTON - If you were
to cobble together a short-form version of Brendan
Fernandes’ recent art-driven itinerary, it would go
something like this: South Africa, Korea, Toronto,
Montreal, Denmark, Pittsburgh, New York, Hamilton,
Algonquin Park, New York, Prague, New York again,
who knows?
“My business card says ‘nomadic artist,’ ” he says
with a chuckle of mild exasperation. New York is
supposed to be home, but “my friends say I don’t
really even live there. I just visit from time to
time.”
Between exhibitions, residencies and projects around
the world (and that much-deserved family vacation in
Algonquin), it’s been quite a year as Fernandes,
just 30, becomes a brand-name on the Canadian and
international art scenes.
And this November presents the tantalizing
possibility for a capper: In Montreal, the $75,000
annual Sobey Prize for contemporary art will be
presented to one of five finalists, Fernandes among
them. But not to get ahead of himself. “It’s a real
honour, absolutely,” he says, quieting a bit. (His
nomination raised several eyebrows - Fernandes’
included - among a community expecting an older,
more established nominee. “I was surprised,
totally,” he shrugs. “The Sobey’s a big deal,
internationally.”)
But there are miles to travel between now and then.
Today, Fernandes is in Hamilton, documenting his
first major solo museum show at the public art
gallery here, which opened in June. A synthetic
tribal-seeming beat thuds with quiet urgency
throughout; in a room off to the side, plastic deer
decoys sport equally faux-plastic replicas of Masai
masks, posed stiltedly amid pale silhouettes of
African spears that line the walls.
Nearby, the main space is anchored by a rough
structure of lumber and corrugated plastic (“I call
it The Shack,” Fernandes says, smiling), which
houses four video monitors, each with their own
crisply-sterile digital rendering of an African
mask.
The monitors pulse as the masks shift from black to
white, some features added, others fading. It’s
ominous but oddly artificial - a sanitized,
simulated dread conjured by computer algorithms
instead of adrenalin.
Which, for Fernandes, is part of the point. “Africa
always gets discussed as this monolith, but it’s a
complex, diverse place,” he says. “Objects, like
masks, are exoticized in this generalized way - just
like the fears created around it.”
He would know. Born in Nairobi, Fernandes’ family
was of Indian descent, having settled in Kenya four
generations before. In short, they were African, but
the British colonial establishment identified them
not only as Indian, but Goan - a southern region of
India (and former Portuguese colony) to which none
of them had ever been, but were labelled with all
the same. “It was the British colonial idea of
divide and conquer,” he said. “There were Goan
schools, Goan churches.”
When Fernandes was 9, his family decamped from
Nairobi - “there was a sense it was just too
dangerous,” he recalled - arriving in Newmarket in
the early ‘90s. Here, Fernandes began to develop a
sense of his hybrid identity more acutely.
“When people see me, they say, ‘well, you’re
Indian.’ But I don’t have a close connection with
that at all. What’s more, we’re Goan Indians, so
we’re Portuguese heritage, too. But I have no
connection to that at all. I’m Kenyan, but also
Canadian - I’ve lived most of my life here. But what
does that mean?
“Cultural identity is something that’s constantly in
flux and in transition, I think. There’s this
constant question of where I’m from.”
Fernandes’ particular hybridity offers a fresh take
on the old standard of identity politics in
contemporary art, and it caught the eye of Philip
Monk, the director of the Art Gallery at York
University. Monk was on the jury for the Sobey this
year, and chose all the candidates on Ontario’s long
list. “It’s refreshing to see some of the themes
Brendan is working with,” Monk said. “He has such a
unique look at identity. He very quickly developed a
focused body of work. For such a young artist, it’s
really something.”
For Fernandes, the general dislocations of his
experience raise questions about identity in an
increasingly false, fractured, homogenizing world.
Love Kill, a series of three simple, animated line
drawings in Hamilton, show three African predators -
a jackal, a lion and a cheetah - their teeth locked
on their prey, moments before death. On headphones,
Fernandes sings, a cappella, three drippy love songs
from the ‘80s (“The technician I was working with
asked me, ‘Is there something you want to tell me?’”
he chuckled).
But the piece underscores the portrayal of the
false-exotic Fernandes feels so intensely. “It’s
like melodrama - every documentary you see of Africa
has to show the kill. And when you’re on safari, you
have to see the kill,” he says. “Tourists want to
have that experience, of wild and untamed Africa,
while they stay in pseudo-huts with hot tubs and
500-thread-count linen sheets. There’s this false
authenticity.”
It’s something Fernandes knows well, his father
having worked in the safari industry as an
accountant before coming to Canada. “When we came to
Newmarket, I was always trying to negotiate a sense
of memory, a sense of nostalgia, and it came to me
through those kinds of documentary films,” he says.
“It’s strange, too, because I didn’t live that
experience every day, but that’s what I’m nostalgic
about.”
Authenticity’s a slippery subject - the notion that
something essential and true could exist at all is,
at best, dubious - and Fernandes offers no treatise
on its value, only questions as to its existence. In
Hamilton, fake deer wear plastic masks reproduced
from an iconic Masai carving - spiritual artifact
recast bluntly as throwaway commodity and tourist
tchotchke. In the shack, masks are stripped of even
the pretense of human hands, cooly rendered with
data and left to glow in the chill of binary code.
It’s a happy coincidence that, in the gallery space
next to Fernandes show is a spectacular, ominous,
unabashedly exotic exhibition of African masks,
donated to the AGH by Toronto collectors Joey and
Toby Tanenbaum. Even here, provenance can be
fraught, Fernandes says, given the mask industry’s
gifts for fakery.
In New York, Fernandes is working on a project for
Art in General, a venerable artist-run centre, that
delves into the cultural headfake commodity culture
routinely pulls. Researching provenance reports from
the Metropolitan Museum’s ancient African mask
collection, Fernandes then cruised the junk stalls
of Canal Street, collecting his own contemporary
artifacts - masks mass-produced and faux-antiqued,
factory style, sold alongside cheap sunglasses and
other tourist-trade standards.
“It becomes like an ‘I Love NY’ sticker - they’re
all sold in the same place by the same people,” he
says.
That these objects are often sold by the same people
for whom they’re meant to carry significance adds
another layer. “A lot of them are African immigrants
from places like the Sudan,” Fernandes says.
A 2008 performance piece, Foe, saw Fernandes hire a
dialogue coach to teach him to speak in the accents
of his forebears - Kenyan and Goan, for example.
Language fascinates him, particular versions of
patois hybridizing the colonial English tongue into
weird cultural systems all their own (the title of
the Hamilton show, “until we fearless,” is “my own
patois,” he says, highlighting the unjustified
terror projected on an oversimplified African
circumstance.)
For all his fascination with the implications of
rootlessness, Fernandes himself is unperturbed by
it. “I question this idea of belonging all the time,
but I’ve moved so much, I’m always able to find a
belonging, so to speak. I’m actually really lucky —
I feel like I belong in many places,” he says.
That said, he’s looking forward to just one. “To be
in my own bed for more than a month?” he smiles.
“That would be great.” |
|
The "Malabar Princess"
Catastrophe – 60 Years Later
Messages that were frozen in time
Published Date: 25 July
2010 | By Martyn McLaughlin
TRAPPED beneath the icy wastes of Mont Blanc, their
sentiments and secrets have been frozen in time.
But six decades after being lost in the
Air India Malabar Princess
air disaster, the poignant contents of a
mailbag which played a key role in a hit film has
been uncovered by a group of Scottish students.
The delegation from Dundee University was on a field
trip to Europe's highest mountain last month when an
undergraduate chanced upon a bundle of letters which
had been on board an Air India flight when it
crashed into the French Alps. Now the university's
conservationists are working to restore the
correspondence, which includes family letters and
birthday cards, before sending them on to the
original authors or their relatives.
Click here to read more...
Background
http://www.montblanc.to/uk/glacier/texte4.html
http://www.chamonet.com/whats_new_article.php?id_whats_new=7278&id_back=1
 November
3, 1950, an airplane from the Air India fleet, the
"Malabar Princess," covering the Bombay-London route
begins its descent to Geneva, where it passes on
stop-over. Everything has gone as planned since
take-off in Cairo at 2:00 a.m. The British
commandant Alan Saint
knows the route by heart. The vehicle is a
Constellation, a four-motor propeller plane. There
were 48 passengers aboard.
At
10:43 a.m., the control towers at Grenoble and
Geneva receive the report, "I am vertical with
Voiron, at 4700 meters altitude." Then nothing. The
plane never landed.
The "Malabar Princess" hit the face of the Rochers
de la Tournette (4677m) on the final arrete of the
Mont Blanc. Stormy weather held back a rescue search
until November 5, when the clouds broke and a Swiss
plane spotted the debris littering the French face
of the summit. If the plane had been just 30 meters
to the West, the accident would have been avoided.
There were no survivors.
The exact causes of the accident were never
clarified. An approaching altitude too low? A
problem with the planes' controls? The storm, the
low visibility and high winds certainly played a
role in this catastrophe. Sixteen years after the
"Malabar Princess," the "Kanchenjunga," a plane from
the same fleet of Air India, crashes in almost the
exact spot.
The Crash of the "Kangchenjunga"
January 24, 1966: a Boeing 707 of the Air India
fleet continues on a scheduled flight between Bombay
and New York by way of Beirut, Geneva and London.
There are 117 passengers aboard, including 46
sailors and Homi Bahabha, the father of the Indian
nuclear program. The pilot,
Captain J.T. Da Souza, is an experienced
aviator.
The Boeing 707 exits the Milan radar reading to be
taken in charge by Geneva. The plane is at 6200
meters when it demands authorization to change
altitude. At 8:00 a.m., all contact is lost.
Rescue operations had profoundly evolved with the
usage of the helicopter. After rapidly arriving on
the site of the accident, the rescuers do not find
one surviving passenger. The Boeing held 200 monkeys
in its cargo hold, meant for usage in medical
laboratories. According to the rescuers, some of the
monkeys had survived and were walking about in the
snow. |
A
controversial new book by journalist Nicholas Carr
makes the bold claim that the Internet is not only
changing how we think, but that it's also lessening
the quality of our thought. Amid the many changes
the Internet is bringing to our cultures, a new
questions arises: what changes is it bringing to our
minds?