The Border Will Not Hold #1

Date2019

MediumPrinted silk organza, pearl cotton embroidery floss, waxed cotton cord, polyester, ink, poplar

DimensionsIncluding frame: 28 1/4 x 25 x 1 1/4 in. (71.8 x 63.5 x 3.2 cm)

ClassificationsTextile

Credit LinePurchased with funds from the Escalette Endowment

Object number2020.12.3

Label TextThis piece is an exploration of how systemic suppression, oppression, and revisionist propaganda can be masked in charming presentations of folk traditions, materials, and nationalistic messaging. Under scrutiny is how historical patterns of persecution elsewhere in the world, are replaying in the U.S. This work centers on the debate around who has the right to claim citizenship, who has the right to seek asylum, and how they are seen by the state. What is important is to see how those in power utilize tropes as instruments of dehumanization concealed behind the rhetoric of pride in one's country.

The imagery is a collage of Moldovan folk embroidery patterns and Soviet-era imagery taken from alphabet primers. These are the primers that my parents brought with them when they emigrated as refugees from the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic and were my first introductions to Russian. The books are filled with Soviet propaganda and along with the alphabet they are embedded with jingoistic ideas, notions of who belongs, support of the militarized state, and how to be a good soviet.

The folk embroidery patterns while beautiful have a much darker side to them. Since my family would never have been ethnically recognized as Moldovan, that they did not wear these patterns would have been another way to mark them as others. For the past 150 years, this region has been traded, battled over, and changed hands between five authoritarian regimes. With each new oppressive state, there was another devastating ethnic purge, forcing another branch of my family to flee and seek refuge elsewhere in the world when possible.

The patterns of state-sponsored suppression, targeted racism, and exclusion may take new forms but they are patterns that continue to repeat. The shadows cast by the delicate embroidery work on the surface of the silk chiffon is a reminder to be wary of both the benign and overt ways in which the threat of nationalism is represented.

Source: http://www.jennyyurshansky.com/Jenny_Yurshansky/The_Border_Will_Not_Hold.html

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