Christopher Cozier: All around us – elsewheres are beginnings and endings
Columbus Museum of Art
Located in Upper Level Atrium, Mary and Bob Kidder Video Space
On view September 19, 2024–January 26, 2025
Admission Information
Christopher Cozier: All around us – elsewheres are beginnings and endings is included with the cost of general admission.
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Exhibition Description
Christopher Cozier: All around us – elsewheres are beginnings and endings is presented in conjunction with Fragments of Epic Memory, on view in the Walter Wing from September 19, 2024–January 26, 2025.
Port of Spain, the Trinidadian city where artist Christopher Cozier lives and works, sits 7,500 miles from Sharjah, a metropolis in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Separated by oceans and seas, these locations appear, superficially, as mirror opposites, the lushly forested hills of Trinidad—an island in the Caribbean—contrasting with the arid Arabian Desert. However, the two sites share a relationship with the petrochemical industry. In the twentieth century, oil and natural gas exports became central to the respective economies of Trinidad and Tobago and the UAE, fueling rapid industrial growth in both countries.
Invited to participate in the 2019 Sharjah Biennial exhibition, Cozier focused on the human labor undergirding the Emirates’ economic boom, recognizing a kinship between migrant workers in Sharjah and the enslaved and indentured people who formerly worked the sugar plantations of the Caribbean. He commissioned a group of manual laborers—many of whom had come to the UAE from countries in Southeast Asia and North Africa—to build and take apart a four-story scaffold in the desert outside Sharjah. This video records this process, cutting between moments of work and scenes where the scaffold sits empty as if the workers had vanished. Local children playfully insert themselves into the video, an accident Cozier decided to embrace. Leaving no permanent trace, the scaffold calls to mind the frenetic pace of real estate development in the Middle East; it also offers a metaphor for solidarity across lines of national origin, citizenship, language, and migration status.
