A Multidisciplinary Project Exploring Links Between Tattoo & Immigration
They wrote the countries borders on my skin is an interdisciplinary exhibition on immigration and tattooing by Montreal-based, French-Syrian artist Poline Harbali, which will take place at the Fais-moi l’art gallery from November 5 to December 30, 2022.
Following her own migratory experience, Poline Harbali launched a call for participants in order to meet newly-arrived women & non-binary people who wanted to share/exchange migratory experiences and to get a tattoo symbolizing their immigration process to Canada.
From a series of interviews conducted with these participants, Poline Harbali collected and archived material to build the narrative of the project.
The exhibition focuses on the experience of getting a tattoo, and on the relationship that the body maintains with the violence of passivity and waiting time of migratory regularization — it proposes tattooing as a cathartic experience and space, which places the migrant individual at the heart of their own experience as a means of breaking out of the dehumanizing administrative process.
Through sculpture, installations, photography, video, and tattooing, They wrote the countries borders on my skin is intended to be an immersive experience in a tattoo session with immigrants in Canada today that questions issues related to border closures and assimilation, but also related to the position maintained by the body of women & non-binary people in the public space.
This painful, bloody and definitive act of scarification becomes a sensitive and cathartic response to this expectation leading to psychological, financial, and social precariousness.
The participants – Awa, Amanda, Juliette, Shelly, Naya, Léa, Mira, and Marina, as well as two who wish to remain anonymous – hail from Lebanon, Brazil, Guatemala, Mexico, France, Senegal, South Korea, and Venezuela. They are educational immigrants, ecological refugees, in political exile, in exile due to their gender identity or sexual orientation, or simply looking for somewhere new to settle.
This wandering body becomes a dwelling place in this experience of the inked skin.
WHAT?
They wrote the countries borders on my skin
by Poline Harbali
WHEN?
NOV 5 – DEC 30
Tuesdays, Fridays, Saturdays
12 PM – 7 PM
Vernissage: Saturday, November 5, 2022 | 6–9 PM
WHERE?
Fais-moi l’art
900 Cherrier, Montreal, QC H2L 1H7
BOX OFFICE
Free Admission
faismoilart.org
