A state of wandering

“Place does not only refer to a land, but to what gives people identity, which if it is not grounded in a common ethnicity, religion or language, it must be grounded in shared ideals, a shared vision of the society it is striving to create”. (1) “Place, “home”, is that which offers a grid for identity, not merely a spatial-temporal location which individuates, but a broad cultural milieu that frames out identities.” (2)

What happens if there is no common ground?
What does it mean to be removed from one’s culture and live as the other?
How does such experience shape us as humans in a longer perspective?

Topics like place and time, home and displacement, belonging and identity are important in my work. I am interested in the importance of location in relation to cultural identity. By exploring how art can talk about cultural and historical identity today, I try to offer ways of seeing the past, present and future, rather than to give knowledge of the way things were or are.

A state of wandering is an installation of objects resulting from a journey – a “process of self-knowledge and identity formation that involved a constant possibility and risk of being lost” in the other. (3)

1) “On Immigration and Refugees” (London: Routledge, 2011) by Michael Dummett
(2) “Philosopher as exile” (2005) by Michael A. Peters with an insight from Farhang Erfani’s essay “Being-There and Being-From-Elswhere: An Existential-Analytic of Exile”
(3) “Showing and Doing: Wittgenstein as a Pedagogical Philosopher” by Michael A. Peters, Nicholas C. Burbules and Paul Smeyers


Photographs are from the solo exhibition “A state of wandering” at the gallery 'Artifex', Vilnius 

The project was kindly supported by Arts Council Norway

2016