Cohen West Gallery

GoggleWorks Center for the Arts

January 29 - March 7, 2021

Wunder Street

In 2009, after more than 20 years away, I began spending time in Reading. My father had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and I returned frequently to help with treatment. On breaks from the routines of care I wandered, revisiting childhood hangouts. In the 2010 census Reading was declared the poorest city in America, and its decline was visible in its shuttered businesses and factories, its foreclosed and abandoned houses, its furtive and quiet streets.

After my father died, I kept returning. Reading wasn’t really mine by this time, or I a part of the city’s social fabric, yet I still knew the city’s rhythms. From 2011 to 2017 I walked nearly every street. At first without purpose or destination and guided by memory, I began after a time to photograph systematically: houses, facades, storefront windows, alleys. The city was slowly becoming rural, as weeds and trees filled vacant lots, as residents cultivated backyard gardens. I visited the parks and woods and surrounding rural landscapes, seeking sites of colonial-era industry: iron furnaces, lime kilns, stone walls slipping back into the earth.

Wunder Street in South Reading has become for me a metaphor for those years of walking the city. Wunder Street, which connects a park to a graveyard. Wunder, German for wonder; when pronounced with a Reading accent, the words sound the same. Wunder, close to wander. Wunder, with echoes of wend and wind. Wunder, which sounds like wound.

About the Artist:

Ivan Sigal is a photographer, writer, and media producer, known for his documentary explorations of societies undergoing conflict or political transition. His creative work explores the boundaries of documentary, art and literary expression. His photography is in the collections of the Corcoran Gallery, the National Gallery of Art and others. He is the author of White Road, a book of photography and writing about Siberia and Central Asia (Steidl, 2012), which was also a solo exhibit at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C. His most recent work includes KCR, a multichannel interactive installation about a defunct commuter railway in Karachi, and Into the Fold of the True, which is mixed media montage, collage, video and code-based installation, composed from rephotographed and manipulated war propaganda taken from film and photography collections at the Library of Congress and other museum collections of war and conflict.

Ivan is the executive director of Global Voices. He is a 2017-2019 Kluge Fellow in Digital Studies at the Library of Congress. He served as the board chair for the Open Society Foundation’s Documentary Photography Project. He is a co-founder of Screen Projects. From 2013-2017 he was a fellow and affiliate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, furthering research in digital storytelling and networked publics. He was a 2017 nonfiction writing fellow at the Carey Institute for Global Good. He was an adjunct professor at the Corcoran College of Art & Design, teaching visual storytelling, and a Senior Fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace, where he wrote about shifts in media technologies, and their effects on violent conflict. He was a regional director and vice president for Internews Network. Ivan has lived and traveled in over 90 countries, and was based in the former Soviet Union and Asia for over a decade. There he developed and led dozens of media initiatives focused on conflict, humanitarian disaster and transitional societies. Ivan was born and raised in Berks County, PA.

http://ivansigal.net/