Sous-série organique SS1 - …from the Transit Bar

This sub-series consists of video components, computer programming components, source tapes and language dubs used in “from the Transit Bar” as well as a wealth of documentation reflecting the enormous undertaking of the project in all of its’ numerous exhibitions and iterations. Included is: correspondence, programming notes, construction diagrams, budgets and catalogues for both phase one “…from the Transit Bar” and phase two, an exhibition at the Art Gallery of York University in 1993.
The work is a six-channel videodisk installation initially made for six monitors. The piece is concerned with the notion of displacement that is as axiomatic as trust between strangers and bar disclosures. Fourteen narrators tell fragmented tales of their experiences of deracination, love, exile and the bar where they meet, and these are interwoven to become a collective telling. Initially taped for documenta IX (Kassel, Germany) in the year the Berlin Wall collapsed, the recounted experiences are fragmented through different languages, with voice-over in either Yiddish or Polish, and sub-titles in alternating English, French or German. An edition of the work (as an “artwork”) was purchased by the National Gallery of Canada.