The Culture of Rights/The Rights of Culture: Jenny Polak
Jenny Polak‘s digital drawing, Design for the Alien Within: The Vanity (2006) is seen above, and is one piece of a furniture series promoting “hypothetical hiding and dwelling places for people without immigration documents.” Drawing on her personal experience of life as a resident alien, current events, and migratory family history, Polak permits border and immigration policies to shape her work, which ranges from architecture to cartography, and beyond.
Other installations include Safe House (2003), an imagined attic in a latter-day Underground Railroad for immigrants fleeing detention, at Islip Art Museum, and In Situ Sanctuary (1st Iteration: Column & Beam) (2003) at Exit Art.
“She makes the immigrants enforced invisibility–visible,” in the words of Krzysztof Wodiczko, who has also called her work “A good double ceiling. A good double trouble.”
Polak currently has a solo show up at Rutgers University, part of the Mary H. Dana Women Artist Series, Culture of Rights/Rights of Culture. Details are available here. The show is on exhibit through March 9 2009, with a speaking engagement with Polak on February 19.
Related posts:
More on Architecture, Cartography, Human Rights, Industrial Design
