Writing by Benjamin Young
excerpted from exhibition catalogue 
(download catalogue as PDF):

          ...Combining the reality of political and economic migration with its flip side—
tourism—Ashley Hunt’s On the Imperative of Movement: Land Is the Only Thing That Lasts also
concerns flight and arrival, this time in the airport of Atlanta, Georgia. Confronted with an
exhibition of stone carving from Zimbabwe inside, the traveler soon encounters a monument
to the American South carved into Stone Mountain outside.The viewer is pressed to
account for the relation between the heroicization of the slave-holding South and the
primitivist representation of the ‘traditional’ arts of Zimbabwe (that supposedly exist outside
the history and politics of the present).
          At issue is the global circulation of images of other cultures, specifically the relation
between the narration of slavery in the history of the U.S. and current representations
of Africa.At the same time, however, these images are inscribed in a certain global economy
that links them in other ways. A symbol of the changes in the world’s economy, a plantation
once at the heart of America’s agricultural and industrial might in the nineteenth
century is re-purposed to meet the needs of the new service and information industries
by becoming a tourist site. In Zimbabwe, poor agricultural workers begin to illegally seize
the farms of white families who gained them under colonialism, as the government decides
what to do about the de facto redistribution of land. One of the few other employment
options for citizens of Zimbabwe is to mass produce hand-crafted ‘traditional’ wood and
stone carvings for sale to tourists and export to the West.The images, then, are connected
not only by their proximity, but by the part they play in the uneven development of the
world economy.
          Scenes from the nostalgic depiction of the American South in Gone With the
Wind provide the connective tissue: How does the narration of history, through tourism,
film, and art, legitimize current inequalities both in the U.S. and world economies? Although
rhetorics of globalization trumpet the destruction of spatial borders by technology, what
are the politics of land redistribution in the ‘third world?’ How does the fact that the
majority of the world still makes its living through agriculture affect narratives of globalization?
What does the consumption of a place’s history by tourists have to do with the
international division of labor, where agricultural production outside the west is increasingly
invisible? Does the ownership of land matter as much as the representation of that
land? How to translate between the poverty endemic to a national economy and that of
the global South? Here, cultural translation requires attention to the exploitation and
inequality that determine what is seen and unseen in the circulation of historical and
ethnographic images.