Globalisation is barely a new phenomenon. Social theorists wax lyrical about the world becoming a smaller place, but this has been the case ever since Sir Walter Raleigh set out on colonial missions nearly 500 years ago. Therefore, at its base, there is little contemporary about the new exhibition at Nottingham’s centre for modern art, which focuses on the wicked and deplorable side to the global village in which we all live.
And it is wicked and deplorable; one of the most nefarious deeds of a globalised economy is the constant masking of gross exploitation and environmental devastation in the East for the benefit of the West. Uneven Geographies tackles these themes and many others in a series of coherent, and often startling, exhibits.
The exhibition seemingly rolls around the idea that globalisation anonymises the oppressed, and seeks to give them a voice – not through the choice of artists, but rather through the choice of art works. One powerful representation of this is in Mladen Stilinovic’s Nobody Wants to See, in which reams and reams of paper sit on wooden supports. So far, so mundane. But closer inspection reveals that narrative has won the battle over aesthetics – the number ‘3’ has been printed upon these sheets six hundred million times, symbolising the wealth of the three richest people in the world being equivalent to that of six hundred million of the world’s poorest. The exhibition could have begun and finished here, the secret is out: globalisation equals poverty.
Nevertheless, there is more to Uneven Geographies than just melancholy social critique, sometimes the message is conveyed in a much more brutal fashion. Oil Rich Niger Delta is a series of photographs by George Osodi which serves as a harsh narrative of the social and environmental ruin caused by Western capitalists seeking to exploit the rich oil reserves in the region. Through Osodi’s lens, we see poignant and dramatic images of landscapes blighted by pipelines, men armed to the hilt protecting land, and, in the most vivid of the collection, a child, presumably the Ogoni boy named in the title, stands almost proudly, arms folded, while clouds of thick, noxious, clouds of black smoke billow, masking the beauty of the environment.
If this all sounds a little too ideologically heavy and almost propagandistic, it is only because the subject matter lends itself to hard-hitting pieces, almost dripping with disdain for the school of thought that puts profit over people. That said, there is space for the ludic in Uneven Geographies, with Cildo Meireles’ imaginative use of the arms of globalisation against globalisation itself within the series Insertions into Ideological Circuits. During a period when the Americans were becoming increasingly involved within Mexico, Meireles printed a series of slogans onto banknotes, and even more amusingly, onto bottles of Coca-Cola in white, so they would only appear once the bottles had been refilled and were back ‘in circulation.’ The slogans, such as ‘Yankees Go Home’, sit in curious and comic contrast upon the bottle that symbolises the awesome force of American capitalism.
Uneven Geographies portrays a world blighted by the invisible forces of neo-liberalism and globalisation, but offers few solutions. The pieces are certainly thought provoking, but equally could be perceived as hope-destroying, and for all the rhetoric that ‘another world is possible’, it seems that any revolutionary fire stoked up by the exhibition would only be dampened by the idea that there is little we can actually do to change the status quo.
Alexander Britton
Tags: art, Cildo Meireles, george osodi, globalisation, Mladen Stilinovi?, nottingham contemporary, uneven geographies
