I collaborated on a video with my son, Ben Wolin, whose Winky Productions (http://www.winkyproductions.com/) makes terrific music videos. The piece, “Are We Home?” is part of an exhibition curated by Filiz Cicek for the Tibetan Cultural Center at the behest of the Dalai Lama. Artists from around the world created work on the theme of “Home”. Our video uses Google Earth images to visit places around the world where I’ve lived along with a voice-over narration on the issue of rootlessness in our culture. Check out the video: http://vimeo.com/24827656
The Photographie Biennale in Lyon was fantastic. They flew 4 of us American photographers over for the opening (Suzanne Opton, Andrea Stern, Andrew Bush and me) of the festival which was called “US Today After”. My show opened the festival which included exhibitions all over the city by photographers from the US and Europe. There were speeches by politicians and arts folk, panels with the artists and French critics and great food (Lyon is arguably the culinary capital of France). Here’s a link for a short video of the vernissage: http://vimeo.com/15099113
My exhibition, “From All Sides”, portraits and stories of Vietnam War veterans (Americans, South Vietnamese and North Vietnamese) opens September 9 in Lyon, France as part of the Photo Biennale: Lyon Septembre de la Photographie. I’ll be heading over for the opening.http://www.9ph.fr/ http://www.culture.lyon.fr/culture/sections/fr/art_contemporain/actualites/usvietnamese_war_veterans_a_bullu
One of my photographs in the “New Faces” exhibition at the New Indianapolis Airport was removed without discussion. The portrait of Shai Sarfati, an Israeli, who served in the military was taken down after someone complained about it to the Airport Commission. They apparently found it offensive that an Israeli soldier would feel regret that, on occasion, innocent Palestinian civilians are sometimes killed after Israel retaliates for Hamas rocket attacks on Israeli civilians. Shai’s portrait is on this website as is his story–you can read and decide for yourself whether his words should be censored or used to address issues of the complexities of war (what Primo Levi referred to as the “moral gray zone”). The Indianapolis Star ran a few front page stories and an editorial on the controversy:
http://www.indystar.com/article/20090103/LOCAL18/901030427
http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090109/LOCAL1804/901090426
http://www.indy.com/posts/airport-gallery-missing-a-voice
And in Nuvo:
http://www.nuvo.net/blog/entertainment/hoppe-art-traffic-control-iaa
http://www.nuvo.net/blog/art/hoppe-arts-more-about-airport
I have begun to slowly incorporate the new portraits of Vietnamese veterans with “Inconvenient Stories”. Catherine Edelman showed a few of the new pieces at Art Chicago in the spring. This fall I had the first show that combined the portraits of Vietnamese veterans with the American vets at University of Kentucky Art Museum as part of the Robert May Lecture Series. Janie Welker, UKAM’s Curator, did a terrific job making connections between the soldiers from the competing armies in terms of the stories and visual relationships. I will be returning to Vietnam in January 2009 to finish the photography for this project which began during my year as a Guggenheim Fellow back in 1992.