Frieze Magazine online
At Stavanger’s Screen City Biennial, artists responded to the theme ‘Migrating Stories’ from personal, biographical perspectives
BY CHLOE STEAD
“Screen City’s nautical location was used to excellent effect in the presentation of Dana Levy’s This Was Home (2016), comprising three screens showing the stories of three generations of the artist’s family, which was exhibited in a sleeper cabin of the biennial’s main location, the MS Sandnes ship. Levy’s film features footage of her maternal grandfather, her father and herself revisiting and reminiscing about their childhood homes in Sosnowiec, Poland, Cairo, Egypt and Atlanta, US, respectively. It tells an idiosyncratic story that nevertheless mirrors historical patterns of Jewish diaspora: her grandfather was forcibly removed from his home and sent to Auschwitz, while her father was compelled to emigrate to Israel to escape the growing anti-Semitism in Egypt in the 1950s and later moved his family to the US in the mid-’70s.”
