Instant Bag, 2006
Installation, Series I-VII
Inside the hungarian artist Tímea Anita Oravecz’s Instant Bags, one finds accurately stored personal objects and various clothing items: what at first seems to be simple suitcases at a second glance reveals their true nature: that of various wooden compartments, cardboard boxes and used materials of a modest value.
These “small boxes”, with their strong symbolism, enclose the identity of a person to whom those objects belong: a traveler or an emigrant, and starting from simple towels, shirts or shoes everything we observe transforms into emotional tension. This tension evokes and suggests a consideration of problems that come together with migration – whether permanent or not, that will take the migrant away from his nation of origin, into a new one, unknown and of uncertain reception.
In moving what imposes crossing of geographical and cultural boundaries the objects that one decides to take with oneself becomes the story of one’s life, one’s history and in a way, it represents what one is leaving behind.
A survival kit becomes in that way a tangible sign of the painful selection one had to make at the moment of departure, lived through without a certainty of a future return. In this way, other objects are added to the ones that represent physical needs of everyday life, maybe even useless, but still symbols of attachment to everything that is familiar, a memory, and from which one does not wish to separate.
These extremely emotionally charged works originate from the starting inquiry, that is, from the questionnaires that the artists wants the public to fill, thus involving them in her project. The suitcases become representations of an identity, an archive of personal memories that unites the present and the past: by observing these instant bags we are asked to compare ourselves with the typical human condition of wandering, of migration, the everlasting symbol of a painful separation, searching, change, reconstruction.
(Giulia Camin)
