As
a curator these days I am actually at a loss how one can react to the
humanitarian crisis we are currently facing. Nevertheless I still
believe in the political strength and energy artistic practice can
unleash not only in the field of art. I am most interested in those
moments where art penetrates into other social fields, where it
shakes people up from their daily routine, if only for a second, or
where it works to empower people who cannot or do not want to be part
of the artistic field (which in many ways often still is very elite
and disconnected from those who do not posses the
knowledge/education/resources to engage with it). I
picked a few projects that either directly react to the current
situations or which I discovered a longer time ago but fit into a
reflection of the many things going wrong theses days.
'Weaponise the internet' by One of My Kind (OOMK)
A
feminist project that deals with self empowerment of young Muslim
women, promoting a positive feeling of their identities in opposition
to the negative definition of being Muslim which is constantly
constructed by media and right wing politics in Europe and the USA.
The MigrationLab is a project that is active all across Europe to bring together migrants, refugees and host communities with means of art and non-formal education. One form of events they initiate was also established in Vienna during the last Vienna Design Week in 2015:
Welcome to The Living Room is a public living room co-created by migrants, refugees and locals in cities across Europe, where these communities share stories and reflections on migration using artistic expression.
Welcome to The Living Room is a public living room co-created by migrants, refugees and locals in cities across Europe, where these communities share stories and reflections on migration using artistic expression.
'True
Finn – Tosi suomalainen', by Yael Bartana, 2014
One
artist whose work I admire a lot is Yael Bartana. For the Finnish
IHMW Art Festival Bartana created a kind of utopian community of
people living in Finland with different religious, ethical and
political backgrounds, thus questioning what a national identity, in
this case Finnishness, actually constitutes.
I
have followed
Janez
Janša’s work for many years, dating back from when he worked as a
choreographer and director under the name of Emil Hrvatin. Together
with two fellow artists from Slovenia and Italy he created a
politically very challenging project by officially renaming
themselves with the name of the then ruling Slovenian prime minister
Janez Janša. To this day I find it thought-provoking in regard to
the issues of identity, nationality, and the relation between the
individual human being and society.
The
Austrian performance art collective God’s Entertainment has
recently produced a project for Kampnagel in Hamburg that they had
previously developed for Wiener Festwochen in 2012. The term
“Intergrationsfähigkeit” (ability/skill to integrate) is now
more topical as ever and all around us in the media and especially in
right winged political debates. After the collective had inquired the
Austrians passing by their “camp” about their will to integrate,
they now asked similar questions in Hamburg.
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