Pauline Galiana embraces that she has always existed between borders . The Algerian-born artist spent her childhood in Switzerland and France and later migrated to the United States . These multiple migrations both conceptually and emotionally inform Portrait of Two Travelers . It is composed of the shredded passport pages of Mr . and Mrs . Kritzalis , two avid world travelers who invited Galiana to transform their coveted passports — a precious object carrying within its pages a memoir of their lives and the privilege of mobility — into collage form . As part of a larger ongoing body of work , The Shredded Series , Galiana considers the ways in which the documents of our lives , whether discarded or no longer in daily use , can be reinvented anew to create alternative or unconsidered narratives . For Portrait of Two Travelers , Galiana puts the Kritzalis ’ passport pages through her laborious forensic process of hand-cutting . The shredded and fragmented pages are looped , folded origamilike , glued , meticulously organized , and woven into new textures , palettes , and lines that , in the artist ’ s words , “ refuse to obey their old authority .” In this process of combined deconstruction and reconstruction , Galiana strips the passport of its embedded preciousness , troubling it as an emblem of order and control , and questioning the psychic versus material value invested in them .
Galiana ’ s kaleidoscopic construction draws viewers forward — encouraging careful inspection of the material from which the passport is woven . Modern passport pages conceal microscopic details indiscernible to the naked eye and are symptomatic of the larger culture surrounding the passport : particularly fear and distrust of the “ other .” This obsessive pursuit of legitimacy in an arbitrary , socially constructed document suggests that xenophobia exists in the passport at a molecular level : down to the very threads that constitute its pages .
— Amanda Elena Brito Museum and Cultural Heritage Studies , Art History
Pauline Galiana , Portrait of Two Travelers , 2022 , shredded passports , paper collage on wood panel , 26 x 38 x 2.75 inches . Courtesy of the artist and Alexander Kritzalis . Photo credit : Ivan Peñafiel .
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