Photos: Fallen Fruit Goes Bananas in Hollywood

(Tom Andrews/LAist)

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Boy, who knew something as simple as a banana was such a big thing? Politics, murder, pop culture, this fruit has it all and the boys from the locally based Fallen Fruit Collective journeyed down to South America to explore the subject and came back with an art exhibit that opened last Tuesday with an event called "Are You Happy to See Me?"

The installation "engages its subject in a range of bold and oblique strategies, signaling perhaps that no single history of the banana is possible," says the show description. "The title for the exhibition, United Fruit comes from the United Fruit Company which exists today in a much reduced form as Chiquita Bananas. More powerful than the Latin American countries it colonized, the corporation was marked by its ruthlessness and corruption, and its exploitation of workers, a turbulent history of protests and events that lead to the infamous Banana Massacre of 1928 near the town of Ciénega, Colombia, which Fallen Fruit visited to create this work. Burns, Viegener and Young chose to retain the title United Fruit for its hopeful and utopian echo, a contrast to its actual history."

You can see at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in Hollywood through September 27th.