The Dual(national)ity images have been taken from a postcard distributed by the German government, about the new citizenship laws introduced on the 1st of January 2000. Featured on the postcard are 'Soon-Sa C.', a South-Korean woman, who has lived in Germany for 12 years and her 'German'-looking boyfriend. The logo on the card is: ‚Typisch Deutsch' (Typically German). The intended message is that she like he, may now claim her right to German citizenship. But we have been told only a part of the story. In an added narrative, integrated into the pictures, the artist Tanya Ury reveals an unexpected twist in the tale around the making of the postcard, in German and then in English.

Tanya Ury

"Typisch Deutsch" (typically German) in big letters, jumps provocatively out at us from the images of the Dual(nation)ality photoseries. It is a fragment of a story that Tanya Ury tells on aluminium plates, altogether nine metres in length. A continuous text pursues real events, a chance conversation sparked of by a postcard advertising the Schroeder government’s new citizenship laws of 2000. Ury varies the enlarged postcard motif, a double portrait of a "mixed couple", an Asian woman and a supposed German, until their facial expressions lose a certain conciseness. The political campaign as well as classifications of nationality become ever more questionable. The artist, creator of many videos, demonstrates here also filmic qualities: the shimmering surface of the aluminium, the zoom, the linear plot. In passing she mentions the privilege of her dual national status and thereby suggests her familial fate as a Jewess, a theme that threads through all her works.

Susanne Grube, Curator Künstlerforum Bonn 2005 (English translation from German Tanya Ury)

“Ury's photography cycle Dual(nationa)lity present a critical and subversive take on the construction of citizenship and its representation in the advertisement campaign that German government launched to promote German citizenship for foreigners.” Pablo Markin. Wednesday, July 1 2009 By pbmarkin.
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