Ash Moniz
To Be Inconvenienced
In To Be Inconvenienced, Ash Moniz looks at the phenomenon of Flags of Convenience: ships that sail under the flag of a nation (with notoriously lenient registration requirements and weak labor standards) other than their own, serving as floating parcels of sovereign territory. As transport workers are responsible for operating the “life-blood” of a nation, with that onus they take on a particular type of citizenship as potential threats to national security. If this citizenship is defined by their position between the nation and the commodity, then how does seeing nationhood-as-commodity create a feedback loop between the act of producing and the thing being produced? This project plots the different roles and positions that speculatively exist within this feedbackloop.
As part of the Büchsenhausen Fellowship, Ash Moniz will be working on a film on this topic. The film will consist of a series of vignettes that will tell the story of a fictional reality that is geographically impossible, yet legally accurate. As a forensic analysis of the designs that write these legal logics, the vignettes will be written in collaboration with lawyers and legal practitioners invested in the sovereignty of maritime labor. This story extends the implications of this legal/territorial framework to its logical ends, breaching material possibility, proposing ways to make representable the legal contours of land and sea, with the paradoxes of materiality that border maritime labor.
(Text source: Ash Moniz)
Ash MONIZ is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice spans performance, installation, video and film. Their research deals with the securitization of supply-chain logistics and its labor. Through interviews and performative collaborations, they work with the ways that stories are told, deconstructing the temporality of narrative structure in Just-In-Time transportation logistics. The word “plot” and its historical etymological connection between land ownership and the arrangement of dramatic structure on a stage, is foundational to how Moniz approaches the intersection of cartography and scenography. Working with artifacts, documents, and found media that span from London 1792 to Sokhna 2013, Moniz “plots” systematic procedures of motion within the flows of value, subject hood, and causality.
Along with a BA from OCAD University (Toronto), Moniz has participated in independent study programs such as Raw Academy (Dakar, Senegal), the Harun Farocki Institute (Berlin, Germany) and Mass Alexandria (Alexandria, Egypt). Moniz’s exhibitions include solo shows at Townhouse Gallery (Cairo), Sishang Museum (Beijing), and Birch Contemporary (Toronto); duo exhibitions at Kelder Projects (London) and Pari Nadimi (Toronto); and group shows at Forum Expanded | Berlinale (Berlin), the Dakar Biennale (Dakar), and the Minsheng Museum (Shanghai) [among others]. They teach at the Cairo Institute for Liberal Arts and Sciences, and write art criticism for the Egyptian online-magazine Mada Masr. Moniz was a member of the artist collective ADL from 2014-2018, and were the assistant curator of the AMNUA Museum in Nanjing, China, in 2014/15.