Join us for the opening of the second edition of the Austrian arts initiative On The Road Again! We are thrilled to host an interdisciplinary mixed-media tribute to the migratory species: human and avian.
This unique exhibition will feature a collaborative project of three Central Eurasian migrant research artists, who tapped into ornithology, computation, folk, video, and performance art, to reflect and connect the routes and narratives of people(s) and birds, whose habitats and life cycles span borders, and continue to be extant in between continents.
Artists: Selbi Jumayeva (TM), Alisa Verbina (RU,AT) and Olha Vinichenko (UA,GB)
The long-distance movements of humans and birds are illuminated through planetary-scale threads of satellite and cellular signals and intimately stitched into a data tapestry. However, local contexts and places unfold how our species are interconnected.
Eurasian lapwings have dwelt across the African-Eurasian flyway and the Eurasian continent for millennia. Anthropogenic climate change has significantly reduced their populations and numbers, and restructured those species’ routes, stopovers, and relations with humans. For the critically endangered Sociable Lapwing (Vanellus gregarius), the Kazakh steppe now is the only place for nesting as it went extinct in Ukraine and China due to intensive conversion of grasslands into crop land. This bird in particular prefers cattle-grazed grassland pastures, made possible by nomadic and semi-nomadic pastoralism. The near-threatened Northern Lapwing (Vanellus vanellus), also a ground-nesting wader, known for its fierce anti-predator behavior, has become a local folklore symbol of a brave home defender. Those synanthropies reveal an intricate interdependence with rural people, providing a traditional ecological knowledge case for a paradigm shift in our understanding of the multispecies climate dignity on the planet.
Artists’s bios:
Selbi is an Ashgabat-based socioecological systems researcher with 25 years of experience in Central Asian grassroots organizing. She is co-curating the project from a transdisciplinary perspective informed by her environmental science training, Turkmen tribal folk art archive, and development work.
Alisa is an Austria-based new media art researcher and cultural moderator with profound experience in documentary practices. Their primary medium is video, through which they intertwine contemporary theories and philosophical concepts into narratives that break conventional conversations about modernity.
Olha is a UK-based performer and a young mixed-media artist, who brings to the project a rich background in performance art and a personal narrative shaped by her experiences with immigration and displacement.
The exhibition will continue until 12 December 2024.
