#7 Marching for the Others
Winner of Korea Artist Prize 2016 ‘mixrice’ Records ‘Immigration’
Casting light upon contemporary artist working for immigrants
The Role of Art in the Era of Hatred
The international community’s interest on the current ‘issue of immigration’ is extremely intense. The United Kingdom withdrew from the European Union, proclaiming ‘anti-immigration’ and ‘anti-immigrants’ last June and as Donald Trump has been elected as the president of the once nation of immigrants, his ‘anti-immigration’ policy seems likely to be enforced in the near future. In the era where the sentiment of ostracizing and detesting immigrants is extending worldwide, various artists are actively working for immigrants, who could be possibly considered as ‘strangers’.
Richard Montoya is an American playwright and he continuously writes and presents plays about illegal immigrants. He is determined to enlighten the public that immigrants are just the same “human beings” as all of us. Professor Brett Stalbaum at UC San Diego presented the work, ‘Transborder Immigrant Tool’ with his fellow artists. This work is a mobile navigation device for immigrants to find water in the desert while they cross the U.S.-Mexico border. This tool leads dehydrated people to the location of water and further recites poetry as another form of nourishment.
In Korea, there’s also an art collective that persisted exploring the issue of immigration through various collaborations with foreign immigrant workers. This art collective is ‘mixrice’ teamed up with two artists, Cho jieun and Yang chulmo. mixrice had arranged ‘Maseok Village Festival’ centered on the Maseok Furniture Complex where a lot of foreign immigrant workers live and also built the space, ‘Light of Factory’, which is a factory system ran in partnership with artists and immigrant workers.
‘mixrice’ has recently extended their field of interest to the migration of plants as they continued surveying multiple traces and procedures of immigration. While presenting a genuine question on the disconnection of time and history and the collapse of the community through the incident of plants being forcibly migrated as a result of abrupt redevelopment, ‘mixrice’ has been awarded as the final winner of Korea Artist Prize 2016, a representative Korean contemporary art award.
