2331 St. Claude Ave and Spain, New Orleans, LA 70117
ph: 504- 710-4506; Hours: Tues-Sat 11am-5pm
Ethnographic Terminalia is pleased to highlight two works installed at Barrister’s Gallery in the St. Claude Arts District: Lina Dib’s interactive video work Recantorium, and Ryan Burns’ sculptural installation Profane Relics: An ossuary of the Congo mineral wars.
Lina Dib, Recantorium
Lina Dib’s Recantorium:
“…foregrounds the human impulse to collect objects, and to imbue these collected things with personal meaning. Literally, a heap of objects belonging to local Houstonians – things that people hang on to or collect for various reasons and simply can’t get rid of – accumulates and disappears.
Accompanying audio narratives relating to the special meanings these objects have for their owners are wound and rewound based on the viewer’s motion. Time, narrative and movement are conflated, and gallery visitors can literally “scrub” the work: using their bodies to start and reverse the flow of time, as well as the accumulation of the collected memories.”
Ryan Burns, Profane Relics
Ryan Burns’ Profane Relics:
“examines the price paid for high-tech gadgetry. It was created by making molds of objects that I cast out of plaster and placed in an immense crate. The crate has been pried open to reveal an archaeological transect: a ten-foot square block of red soil, whose strata have been treated to reveal objects contained in the matrix. These objects tell the story of the past twenty years of war and mineral exploitation in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The artifacts and waste of cultural disarticulation and total war lie with the crude hand-tools of small pit mining; traces of the bush meat trade jumbled together with discarded high-tech ephemera, smart phones and laptops, whose capacitors are assembled of coltan and other Congolese minerals.”
