My recently completed project Down and Out in the South featuring homeless men and women from the Southern USA (Columbia, SC, Atlanta, GA, and the Mississippi Delta) has been selected as part of an exhibition in the JJ-W Hotel in Tainan, Taiwan during April and May 2012. The exhibition, “Non-Homes: Living in Art and Art Living in the JJ-W Hotel,” intends to bring new thoughts to art and to the hotel itself. The JJ-W Hotel is a hybrid of a hotel, gallery, forum, and online platform, as well as a long-term experimental project that aims to host various cultural events. Provisionally called “Face-to-Face Room,” visitors of this exhibition will “live” with the art by spending a night in a Face-to-Face room. These are temporary rooms set up in the JJ-W Hotel’s experimental exhibition space. The curator of the exhibition, Pei-Kuei Tsai (Courtauld Institute of Art, London) proposes to integrate the photographs from “Down and Out in the South” into the walls of the Face-to-Face Room, transforming the whole room into an artwork itself. He believes that this will offer a thought-provoking experience, allowing visitors/guests to reflect on the meanings of (non-)home.
The “Non-Homes…” exhibition has been recognised by Taiwan’s National Culture and Arts Foundation as one of the best curated exhibitions for 2012. Among some of the participants already planned are film directors Ming-liang Tsai and Kang-sheng Lee, photographers Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin and Julian Stallabrass and director of the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts Pei-ni, Beatrice Hsieh.
For more information, see the JJ-W Hotel or the Courtauld Institute of Art.
- Jan Banning
May 4th 1954, Almelo
Dutch photographer and artist. Banning was born in the Netherlands from Dutch-East-Indies parents. He studied social and economic history at the Radboud University Nijmegen, and has been working as a photographer since 1981. A central theme of Banning's practice is state power, having produced series about the long-term consequences of war and the world of government bureaucracy.