Souvenirs for the Landlocked

Meriç Algün Ringborg
Born in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1983.
She lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden.

Meriç Algün Ringborg’s practice is driven by her experience of living and navigating between two cultures—Turkey, the artist’s home country, where she earned a BA in visual arts and visual communication design, and Sweden, where she completed her education with an MFA and where she now lives. The uncertainties of moving between these two countries have sensitized Algün Ringborg to issues of migration, identity, belonging, difference, and mobility that are at the center of her work.
Algün Ringborg’s formally concise, conceptual practice spans various media. Her work is guided by strict parameters and a rigorous methodology that help render visible complex structures and relationships. This strategy enables her to investigate, analyze, and decode the cultural, bureaucratic, and linguistic systems that affect one’s life. Language, as crucial to one’s identity, is a particularly valuable tool that Algün Ringborg uses to excavate similarities and differences. Rather than writing in her own subjective voice, she often chooses to appropriate elements of institutional language so as to undermine their implicit claims to universal truth. In her early work The Concise Book of Visa Application Forms (2009), for example, which took the form of a hand-bound encyclopedia-like book, she brought visa application forms from all over the world together in a single volume. The language used in these forms clearly illustrates the lengthy bureaucratic processes that non-EU citizens in particular have to go through before they are permitted to travel. In A Work of Fiction (Manuskript) (2013), Algün Ringborg assembles a short novel from standardized sample sentences from the Oxford English Dictionary. The artist’s presentation at the 56th Biennale di Venezia extends her interest in the parameters of belonging and border crossing to the maritime realm. In this project she considers the significance of containerized cargo shipping, which currently facilitates ninety percent of the world’s trade, thereby interconnecting the planet through shipping routes, exported and imported goods, and the human relations involved in that process. The immersive installation that the artist created for this event was inspired by the artist’s grandfather, who worked on cargo freighters for more than forty years, traveling from the northern parts of Russia to the Cape of Good Hope in Africa, and from Brazil to Japan to Canada. Each time he returned home from a lengthy absence, he would bring souvenirs for each family member. These souvenirs form coordinates in Algün Ringborg’s disorienting hybrid environment. They introduce the paradox of an encapsulated and domesticated outside world. When they become affixed to a specific place, they act as signifiers for the threshold between these localities. A red metal floor and a water line on the wall call to mind the deck and hull of a ship, while a cabinet overfilled with china, a vase on a pedestal referencing a gift service for “ship-to-shore” flowers, two wall clocks, and a handmade carpet depicting the world’s shipping routes suggest a more domestic environment. Half ship, half home, this space complicates binary definitions of relations between sea and land, mobility and immobility, and leads us into an interstitial psychic space.