Overview

Gideon Mendel’s exhibition called Dzhangal presented a mixture of photographic and object art as a portrait of the lives of the refugees who lived in the now-closed camp at Calais.  He recovered personal and environmental items from the camp and sought to create a document of the chaos of life as a refugee, by trying to apply some form of order to what he saw.

My analysis

Mendel was interviewed during the installation of his exhibition at the Autograph Gallery in London and described the way his original concept for his work had not been successful.  He had originally put the emphasis on photographing the refugees themselves, placing himself in their world.  He wanted to tell the world about their plight but ran into the seemingly obvious issue of them not wanting to be photographed for reasons of possible identification and the potential consequences thereof.  By shifting his emphasis to the trace elements of their existence, he created an equally powerful picture of life for the people of the camp.  I was particularly drawn to the mix of items in the exhibition.  For a photographer, Mendel’s exhibition contained a relatively small number of photographs compared to the physical items.  My initial conclusion was that Mendel didn’t want to use photography as a pseudo-objective way of telling the story, presumably because of the potential for criticism of bias. With the shifting political mood around the acceptance of immigrants into the UK at the time, the collection could be seen as an anti-policy statement being made by a non-UK artist.  As ridiculous as that might seem, the use of items collected from the camp as part of the exhibition does suggest objectivity.  As well as the curiosity of the items, such as the collection of toothbrushes that had Mendel wondering about the traces of DNA from their owners, the police tear gas canisters were also included.  The latter factually states that there were conflicts between the refugees and the authorities, whether we chose to acknowledge it or not.  It was when I watched the documentary [1] that I realised that even the objects themselves were chosen to emphasise that narrative.  The inclusion of the twisted bicycle pointed to a deliberate destructive act, but it could just have easily been damaged in the clearance of the camp.  Mendel’s own family were refugees that fled the holocaust, so it’s not really a surprise that he wanted to push the hardships suffered by the people of the camp.  When considering that context, the photographs in the collection actually focus more on the everyday life of the people rather than their experiences.  It isn’t lost on me that my perception of the exhibition changed with research, as external context can frequently shift the way we think about what we see, even by a tiny amount.

References

[1] 2017, “Calais Jungle Artist Gideon Mendel: ‘Nigel Farage would despise this exhibition’, Evening Standard Interview, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVrn0XqfnBs