Belonging to a region, a place, a family, a culture, shared values, worldviews and a common past are essential components of personal identity. These deep ties, woven into the self-image, often contain boundaries from other groupings. There are we and beyond perceived, actual or propagandistically generated boundaries are the others. Such demarcations may consist of regional, national, legal and religious differences. They can lead to walls, barbed wire, hatred and violence. Many of these boundaries unfold subliminally in barely perceptible facets and trivialities. The look into the eyes, the appearance, the colour of the hair or skin, the clothes or the facial expressions and the gestures, the place of residence, all this can take on the dimension of completely opposite values and worldviews.
The artworks in the exhibition unfold the narrative strands around themes of Fortress Europe. They are about flight and migration and about dreams and hopes that the other can also promise. They deprive the stagings of visually stunning national falsification of history of their seductive power. They refer to another body, as it offers itself in the images of wellness, beauty mania and sexist stagings. They reflect the challenges of one's own intelligence through the other, artificial intelligence. They play with the transformation of discarded garbage into another, valuable object. The exhibition is a mirror in which pressing themes and questions of the present are reflected in the individual perspectives that the artists focus on them.
This exhibition is supported by the ifa exhibition funding.
