THE FINALISTS
THE PROPOSAL: "The Weather in the Red Zone"
My proposed project for the Present Group revolves around a photocopied workbook for children that I found on the street. While there is nothing particularly noteworthy about the content of the workbook itself, it is its front page that serves as the starting point for this project. The page features a poem titled “Change in the Weather,” above which sits the name Brother Muhamud, handwritten in pencil. The presence of the name activates this document politically, situating it within narratives of national security and competing epistemologies while creating a rift between intended use and symbolic content. “The Weather in the Red Zone,” attempts to subtly shift these narratives through the unsiting and reinscription of the document within the representational economy of science fiction. Recast as a zone, the red associated with notions of insecurity and threat is spatialized, making reference not only to the dystopic cartography of a new world order, but the resistance to this mapping as well. Reproducing the image from the front page of the handout as a silkscreen print in red ink on red paper, this work seeks to graphically contest the truth-effects embedded in the document and open it to new narratives and new readings.
Artist Statement
Matthew Rana is an artist and writer based in Oakland, CA. Primarily taking the form of drawing, publications, performance, text and video, his research considers epistemological, historiographic and representational problematics through the lenses of narrative and performativity. Working within several collaborative frameworks, his recent projects include: “The Autobiography of Ernest Patrick Butler: His Battles with God, Life and Self” (2009), a comic book co-authored with Rick Butler, a homeless man who sells handmade crocheted hats at the MacArthur BART station, and “The Gondolier’s Song,” a video and sound performance in which a piano piece was played for Venetian gondoliers while traveling by motorboat through the canals. He is currently writing, with artist Malak Helmy, a science fiction novella titled “Warak.”
