BETWEEN BORDERS is a group exhibition that explores the ways in which borders define, question and document our world today. During the last twenty-five years we have seen many socio-political, cultural and economic changes, changes in the way we communicate, and in our ability to travel. Decisions about where and how we live and work all the more often concern the crossing of borders.
The artists and works grouped under this title each narrate all the different ways in which people's lives are affected by the borders, by the limits, by the frontiers. From their particular viewpoints they tell us about the traces and consequences of modern-day situations. Territory, displacements, memory and utopia constitute the leitmotiv of the show, inviting us to go beyond the contemplative and telling us about stories and conflicts, immigration and emigration, realities and fictions, spaces and their surroundings, about the sense of belonging, about individual and group identities, and also about ‘no-man's lands' and no-places.
We know the content and we know how to pinpoint it on today's geopolitical map. The Soviet past of Kyrgyzstan underlies the work of artists Muratbek Djumaliev and Gulnara Kasmalieva; Albert Heta betrays his Kosovar origins in a series that inevitably alludes to the recent conflict in the Balkans. The exhibition takes us from East to West, from Orient to Occident; from the Mountains with no name in the Pandjshêr Valley in Afghanistan, captured by Marine Hugonnier, to the Bosphorus separating Europe and Asia in Istambul as revealed to us through the eyes of Ergin Çavuşoğlu, in a border passage both physical and imaginary.
Carolina Grau, the curator, has sought to offer an overview of a generation of artists engaged with their history; a ‘committed' art that invites us to reflect on present-day situations which the artists portray with documentary curiosity and even playfulness, with the aim of representing an experience in order to render it visible. Now the frontier is a nexus for grouping together these artists who, since the nineties, have exercised a critique of the wider aspects of globalisation: for instance, the reality of immigration and the ‘no-man's land' present in the installation of the Swiss/Greek/Italian artist Costa Vece, or the work with patriotic songs from different countries, states or communities by the Serb Serb Maja Bajević. Illegal immigration and the mafias behind it are the protagonists of the work of Guzmán de Yarza Blache, which finds its counterpoint in the interpretation Jun Yang makes of his own experience as a Chinese immigrant in Austria, and in the more poetic perspective of Bojan Šarcevic.
In denunciatory tone, Santiago Sierra recalls history through a series of photographs evoking the main political events of the 20th century. Alejandra Riera and Fulvia Carnevale examine the situation of the territory between Bolivia and Argentina, where the clandestine economy has provoked inequality and poverty. Zineb Sedira blends social criticism and irony in her analysis of linguistic conflicts, as played out in a (failed) meeting held between three generations of her family that each speaks a different language. Language and communication are also the theme of Anri Sala as well as Pierre Bismuth with his particular version of The Jungle Book.
Frontiers separate conflicting countries and are the scenes of displacements caused by wars; they indicate a change in language; and they constitute a geographical and symbolic point of inflection which, with its various meanings, lies at the origin of everyday occurrences. Europe is dismantling boundaries among EU member states while control measures are being tightened against immigrants from Africa. While citizens from underdeveloped countries seek emigration as a way out, increasingly top manufacturers are relocating production to these countries to reduce costs. Šejla Kamerić explores this paradox by situating at the exhibition entrance two signs directing us to one place or another, depending on whether we belong to the European Union or to the others.
In fact, if we think of the frontier as a beginning more than as end, as ‘the point at which something starts to be what it is', we will notice that many of these works analyse the concept of border from the other side. De l'autre côté is the title of a series of films by Chantal Akerman that focuses on the Mexican-US border and which is represented in this exhibition with one of its films.
