The Floor is Yours

Sead Kazanxhiu weaves barbed wire to symbolically recreate a structure that also takes the form of a lectern, or podium. With a sharp irony, the work reflects on the Romani Resistance during the  Holocaust, as the only resistance that hapened during the Holocaust and only little is spoken about. The artist gives the shape of podium to lift up the discussion about the Romani resistance, and give the floor to its oun people to talk about it. He takes the element of the barbed wire, as an symbol that is used as defence in the concentration camps, but at the same time also to mark borders
destruction and erasure of borders, provoking a new understanding of our responsibility for territory and public speech. Kazanxhiu aims to present viewers with a means of resistance that does not have to involve the use of human resources in order to produce a counternarrative, but which instead uses art as a means to oppose oppressive systems of power, challenging the traditional perception of cultural resistance.

 

Lectern

Materials: lectern composed of barbed wire, metal (iron)

Dimensions:115 x 70 x 50 cm

Weight: 52 kg

2016

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