Mention a foreign object and most people think of medical shows or crime dramas, where something unexpected has been discovered in a person’s body, the sort of visceral horror that made filmmaker David Cronenberg famous. Yet the term carries broader meanings that resonate deeply in contemporary society.
A foreign object could be anything material dislocated from its original time or place: art and artefacts brought back from colonial enterprises and displayed in a museum, objects that reflect a society’s understanding of what constitutes the familiar and the other. To a degree, all art can be seen to create estrangement, forcing us to confront the familiar in the strange or the strange in the familiar. There is an incessant translocation between the object and ourselves, between the foreign and the known. By exploring art, we come to regard ourselves in hitherto unexpected ways; we become foreign objects within our own bodies, in our own time. The assumed boundaries of who or what we consider ourselves to be are challenged, and we begin to question our own constituent parts and paths. In essence, encountering the foreign is encountering new ideas, new selves, our selva obscura.
This issue aims to explore the relationship between ourselves, our assumptions, our pasts, and our potential futures. We live in an era of paradoxical change: of boundaries and nationalism, but also of inclusion, celebrated difference, and the search for new limits. As we discover new things in virgin territories, we must examine those processes by which we make things foreign and those by which we make things familiar. The acceptance of novel phenomena into our worldview has long been the subject of philosophical inquiry, but as our ability to encounter the world expands through increased virtualisation, so too do the methods through which we categorise the new. If we’re fortunate, this expansion alters not only what we find useful, but even what we consider possible.
Art is at the forefront of how we conceive of our full potential as human beings, a reality which endeavours to find the irreplaceable in the perspectives of others and the invaluable in that which we share with strangers. As travellers all in unfamiliar territories, we invite you to embrace what feels foreign, to perceive yourself transformed by the unexpected. Give the four winds your sail.
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Contents: Trebuchet magazine – contemporary art
Our Foreign Culture: Cité Internationale Des Arts
Outsider Stars: Sverre Malling
Dalí’s Lobster Phone And The Language Of Desire
Curves Of Thought: Simon Tayler
Bones, Helmets And Uncomfortable Truths: Victor Spinelli
The Inevitable Otherness Of Being Human
Foreign Objects In Local Places: Orobie Biennial
Europe’s Art Weeks Come Together: Spider Network
The Insecurity Collection: National Galleries
The Oracle Speaks In Silence: Ljubljana Biennale
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Maurizio Cattelan @mauriziocattelan_fake
Julius Von Bismark @juliusvonbismarck
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Corrigendum Pg14-23 ‘Our Foreign Cultures’
While both shows have curatorial direction from Cité internationale des arts Culture Programme Manager Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, Cité as an institution is only associated with the show at the Louvre. Resonant is a separate curatorial project and should be credited to MACS MTO and the initiative for practices and visions of radical care. Saul Williams’ series and work was titled “Ancient European Depictions of the Palestinian Christ” not “Jesus was Palestinian”.
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. – Aristotle
