4 x 5.25"; 22 pages. Archival inkjet print. Sewn binding. Covers simulate a passport. "Your Documents Please" exhibition called for artists from around the world to create Passport/ID documents for a traveling exhibition. Wehr's Paszport is one of more than 250 bookworks in the exhibition. Exhibition statement: "The lives of people are shaped by the legitimacy or illegitimacy of their status in the groups and institutions with whom they interact. As globalization proceeds and local bonds are eroded, identification documentation such as passports, credit cards, drivers' licenses and calling cards has become the physical medium in which the political, commercial, cultural and ultimately the spiritual disposition of the individual are negotiated. As new forms and criteria of identification are produced even the nature of identity is changed.... " The organizers asked participants to make a small artwork (the size of a conventional passport or less) that functions visually or conceptually as if it were an identification document....The resulting international traveling exhibition reflects a contemporary spectrum of issues of identity and the impact of its documentation." Paszport presents and re-presents Beata Wehr's nomadic life, encapsulating and juxtaposing her travels in time and distance. An presumably unchanging fingerprint is background and foreground to a stamp than shouts "Alien" and a series of photographs that document external and personal change. The center spread show a surreal landscape of columns topped by Polish (?) heroes amid saguaro cacti, which is frame for this artist's life, in both time and distance - from Poland to Tucson. |
