Tania Candiani

Drawing from a group of images by photographer Dorothea Lange, Making camouflage nets for the War Department (1942), Tania Candiani reenacts the forced labor of Japanese Americans incarcerated in concentration camps at Manzanar and the Santa Anita Assembly Center in California during World War II.

Supervised by army engineers, groups of women wove huge, camouflage nets made from hemp, designed to fit over tanks and other war machines. Recreating the giant loom-like structures and working with performers to recreate the camouflage over the course of the Frieze art fair, Candiani seeks to make visible the choreography of coerced labor during this reprehensible episode in American history, and draw correlations to the current migrant’s detentions camps in the US/Mexico border.

Camouflage. Frieze Projects. 2020. Curated by Pilar Tompkins Rivas and Rita González,. Presented by Instituto de Visión, Bogotá.