Curator
Performing the Border (2017)
Kunstraum Niederösterreich, Vienna
Monira Al Qadiri, Halil Altindere, Francis Alÿs, Ursula Biemann, Tiffany Chung, Julien Creuzet, Khaled Jarrar, Leon Kahane, Martin Krenn/Oliver Ressler, Eva Leitolf, Hana Miletić, Anahita Razmi, Christoph Schlingensief, Hito Steyerl, Wermke/Leinkauf, Clara Wildberger, Miao Ying
The exhibition Performing the Border presents artistic works which are not satisfied with the obvious and evident and choose to focus their attention beyond to the outside. In a present time, where large parts of the globe are marked by racism, isolation, restricted freedom of the press, and “post-factual” debates, the artists plot scenarios in which the dubious categories of the “own” and the “foreign” can become tangible for the viewer. They conceive the complex field of national, ethnic, social, digital, and sexual identity as a realm for experiment.
They discuss the border as an image-based zone of “events”, which has been corrupted into a questionable iconography of diverse stakeholders in our mass medial present. Or they document and reflect upon territorial borderlines as a site of global migration by triggering a discussion on the fragile concept of national in- and exclusion. Other works, in turn, reveal the absurdity of the border crossing, which manifests and is physically experienced as a solidified line running through the landscape. The concept of a border becomes a metaphor, a construct, which is not static rather the subject of agreements and negotiations.