100 Days on a Fulbright: Day 33: Mari Bastashevski

Mari Bastashevski. Excerpt Chapter II. 2012-13. http://maribastashevski.com/?/state-business/Chapter-II/ 

I’ve been keeping my eye on the Container Residency (http://www.containerartistresidency01.org/) launched last year, but I’m skeptical of the degree to which the artworks can vary from this one experience. Over this week, I’ll make notes each artist, in order of route listed here: http://www.containerartistresidency01.org/routes/

First up: Mari Bastashevski, http://www.containerartistresidency01.org/artists/mari-bastashevski/#travelogue

Mari Bastashevski departed from Odessa, Ukraine on March 25, 2016 en route to her first stop, the port of Istanbul, Turkey. She will travel to Haifa, Israel; Nhava Sheva, India; Port Klang, Malaysia; Da Chan Bay, China; and Busan, South Korea, before disembarking in Shanghai on May 1st.

Personally, I’m grateful for a picture of her collected readings, pictured on the site, and after some work, I've listed them with links below.

• Frank Radcliffe: A Story of Travel and Adventure in the Forests of Venezuela by Achilles Daunt (https://www.amazon.com/Frank-Radcliffe-Adventure-Forests-Venezuela/dp/B008UARCW6)
• Billy Budd...and Other Tales (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations) Hardcover – May, 1988 by Harold Bloom (Author), Herman Melville (Editor), & 1 more (http://a.co/iy6Nlp7)
• Walter Benjamin Illuminations (http://a.co/fwuDii0)
• The Voyaging Stars by David Lewis (http://a.co/6RgaQbm)
• Theory of the Avant Garde by Peter Burger (http://a.co/3mjo8yT)
• Seen Unseen by Martin Kempt (http://a.co/doLMKv3)
• Policing and Prisons in the Middle East by Laleh Khalili (Editor), Jillian Schwedler  (Editor) (http://a.co/b9hqbN3)
• The Archaeology of Islands by Paul Rainbird (http://a.co/83Gpx9o)
• Future War by Christopher Coker (http://a.co/i4PZPc5)
• The Human Snapshot by Editors Thomas Keenan and Tirdad Zolghadr (http://a.co/3lgd2Lx)
• Anywhere or Not at All by Peter Osborne (http://a.co/7EknDVJ)
• The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence by Deborah Cowen (http://a.co/d1WVpTe)
• Conversations with Claude Levi-Strauss by Claude Levi-Strauss and Didier Eribon (http://a.co/1CBjEc0)
• Against the Self-Images of the Age: Essays on Ideology and Philosophy by Alasdair MacIntyre (http://a.co/0Bw75nJ)
• Staging Disorder by Christopher Stewart and Esther Teichmann (http://a.co/aIKHYP1)
• Renee Green: Ongoing Becomings - Retrospective 1989-2009  by Nora M. Alter, Diedrich Diederichsen, Kobena Mercer (http://a.co/h0hPalx)
• Moby Dick by Herman Melville (http://a.co/eTGqJS6)

Bastashevski’s photos from onboard the cargo ship seem like typical shots (albeit with fantastic sense of composition and craft) of workers with less agency, but the strength of her past work (http://maribastashevski.com/) rests on her ability to behind closed doors to document people in power. I hope similar strategies were used on her container residency and can be easily viewed later. The residency photos immediately bring to mind Allan Sekula’s Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo-works 1973-1983, recently re-released by UK publisher Mack (http://www.mackbooks.co.uk/books/1112-Photography-Against-the-Grain-Essays-and-Photo-Works-1973-1983.html) and reviewed here (http://www.americansuburbx.com/2016/11/allan-sekula-against-the-grain-an-interview-with-david-campany.html) through an interview between Sunil Shah (http://www.sunilshah.info/about) and David Campany (http://davidcampany.com/).

Mari Bastashevski. Stack of books for container artist residency. 2016. http://www.containerartistresidency01.org/artists/mari-bastashevski/#travelogue