"Our Gift"

Our gift is a real gift to the city, where it stands. It is playing with the question of trust. When you receive a gift, you need to trust and accept it. The person who gives the gift is honored, when the other accepts it, and deeply hurt, when a gift is not accepted. As Dora Hegyi, curator of this year 's Periferic Biennial writes in her concept for the Iasi biennial, giving a gift is an alternative model of exchange beyond market values, these can be cultural or social values, "the exchange can be mutual, but it reflects a complex system of different motivations: power relations, dependence, as well as desire for prestige".

"Our Gift " is one of my many projects dealing with our imagination of east and west, - dealing with our imaginations of the unknown content of the gift. Dealing with the gift as an expression of love towards to another person whom we give a gift and with the metaphysical, religious notion of a gift.

Placing an object, which is usually part of private personal exchange in public space, - an object, which is wrapped - is also dealing with political paranoia .

Will the city or community to whom I offer a gift believe me, that the content of my gift - the real one or the symbolic contact - is a positive content? Will it be accepted? Or is it just one of the suspicious abandoned objects in public space causing fear ? I'd aim to place a monument into a very complex field of mutaul fears and affections through the white semi-transparent object of beauty an gracefulness.

"Our Gift" is in this form as it exist at this moment a photographic work made by Salam Haddad, filmmaker from Baghdad, that lives in Budapest based on my concept and object.

Roza El-Hassan 2008, Stockholm