A crowd of 15 gathered last Wednesday in the small library of the Townhouse Gallery to hear “When Tomorrow is Today, a discussion by Lasse Lau, a self-described “queer and social activist, visual artist and filmmaker based in Brussels.
The talk covered several of Lau’s “socially engaged works, ranging from a project on housing and gentrification in Toronto, to New York-based projects and responses to American involvement in the Iraq War. From his time studying fine art, living in the East Village of New York City, Lau spoke of his experience of the American people’s “disconnect from the Iraq war. The latter he represented visually in his first slide of the evening, a self portrait of himself reading the newspaper in a bathrobe and sunglasses on a Miami balcony.
The lecture moved to a kitschy project on hyper-responses to the “War on Terror, using images of modern emergency kits. Lau concluded with a lengthy articulation on a past project with collaborator Anthony Graves, based on the unsubstantiated police killing of Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes in London. De Menezes, a 27-year-old electrician, was shot five times in the head after being mistaken for a “terrorist in a subway station.
Lau’s project took the form of overhead projections of pertinent newspaper clippings, focused on contradictory “eyewitness accounts in a Copenhagen gallery.
Lau is in his fifth week in Cairo for a six-week residency at the Townhouse Gallery. His presence is the result of a German-initiated exchange program, called Radius; a collaboration between institutions in Germany, Poland, Denmark and Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt. Artists from these regions reside at different institutions, their time culminating in a meeting and group exhibition in Kiel, Germany.
In an interview with Daily News Egypt following the lecture, Lau elaborated. “The Townhouse Gallery wanted someone who was not a student, someone who had some experience and also someone who had some media skills.
Lau put his background in film-making to the service of the Townhouse’s outreach program. From the start, Lau was interested in the outreach program, for its involvement in community work, and participation with “non-artists.
“It seemed natural for me to tap into that. I thought it was an easy way of getting into the community. In a series of informal sessions, Lau worked with a few Iraqi teenagers, in particular a boy with a self professed interest in film, on a documentary on his Iraqi peers. Lau introduced the two to some film techniques and editing skills.
“I’m trying to connect him with other people who can help him, I wish there was someone here to carry on the work.
Though educated and active in the formal art world, Lau spoke the disconcerted rhetoric of one at odds with the art market. “I’m not interested in community art per se as an art form, but I see it as a strategy of working together with non-artists to broaden up their aesthetics … People see community art as something with drawings and kids, ‘we paint a dumpster’ or something like that, and it’s a pity that that has become community art, because that’s not what I feel community art could be. It could be much more progressive.
In his presentation earlier in the evening, Lau showed a series of sophisticated photo collages by young participants from a workshop he held in the Toronto housing project. Lau spoke of a resonance to said community because of personal experience in his youth with a single mom, living in a similar housing situation.
“What I meant with broaden aesthetics, is that there’s a very strict aesthetic on what is art and what is non-art. And often that’s not aesthetics by other cultures, it’s a Westernized monopoly. I’m not very happy with the White cube and how it claims to be neutral, that it claims to be a part of the community and I think that’s fake. They have a responsibility, like the Townhouse has.
“A good example for me is the Palais de Tokyo, he said, referring to the gallery co-founded by Nicolas Bourriaud, who coined the term “relational aesthetics. Relational aesthetics is a theoretical movement of the 1990, critical of the art worlds’ lack of connection to “the real or human life in social context; wary of its practical relevance,
Lau spoke of the Parisian gallery in league with an “escapist modern art world. “When I did a residency there, all the work was on fine dining and things. It made me say ‘Relational to who’?
In Lau’s estimation, shows that are “political are not currently supported in the art world. “It’s also interesting. Which are the shows that keep on living in our history? Often these kinds of shows are excluded.
