Alongside the strategies so favoured and indulged by the art market – banalisation, irony and self-referentiality - a type of art has now established itself whose credo is to witness and intervene, to address and to touch. There is an increasing number of projects that explore existential and realistic themes beyond grief and pathos. The exhibitions discussed in the following article are striking examples of how an aesthetic of compassion and presentification can be used in different ways as a counterbalance to the dominant culture of suppression and forgetting.

[b]Poetics of emptiness[/b]

»While the moment of disappearance and immediate suffering still become a media spectacle that is broadcast a million times over, the media pay little attention – and soon none at all – to background histories and delayed consequences, everyday dramas and insidious losses,« write the curators of the exhibition »vom Verschwinden. Weltverluste und Weltfluchten« (»On Disappearance. Loss of World and Escaping from the World«), Inke Arms and Ute Vorkoeper, in their catalogue. Here, they not only define the theme of their exhibition in the Hartware MedienKunstverein in the Phoenix-Halle in Dortmund, but also sum up where art that has pretensions to relevance must be located and from where it has to speak: into and out of the gaps and holes, voids and intermediate spaces of human experiences, which, despite or perhaps because of the permanent floods of information, emerge in constantly new variations.

»vom Verschwinden. Weltverluste und Weltfluchten« is a striking visual exhibition full of electronic and seemingly immaterial images. It connects with experiences, realities and fictions of today and intelligently and precisely brings the voluntary and involuntary losses of world and escapes from it into dialogue with one another. Here, »World« becomes a metaphor for being-in-the-world, for human existence on a collective and historical plane. Because this concept of world is so fundamental, themes such as displacement, migration, genocide, terrorism, fundamentalism, drug abuse and stock market crashes can and must be treated, without drifting into relativism or political hyper-correctness. The exhibition and its venue – a disused, once monumental steel factory in the Ruhr area – confront us radically with the question of how we can live and how we want to act in a world that has become as good and as bad as it is today.

Upon entering the hall, we are confronted by an empty space in the middle. At its edges flicker projections of images and films. As a help to orientation, the curators have created overlapping zones that they call »Insecurity« (Haltlosigkeit), »Destruction«, »Time Leaps« and »Terrain Vague«. The video work »Middlemen« by Aernout Mik has to do with insecurity; it uses actors to restage the total stock market crash and the complete demoralisation of brokers. Next to it is destruction: the panorama »Untitled« by Wolfgang Staehle, a live 24-hour documentation of the Manhattan skyline using two video cameras. Although Staehle by chance filmed the attack on the WTC in September 2001 and could probably provide the most comprehensive documentation of the event that exists, he, like all the other artists in the exhibition, shies clear of anything that is spectacular or has a high media impact. What is shown is a superficially »pretty« digital landscape picture from September 18 2001, which is meant nonetheless as a testimony and calls into question the power of images in an era of media frenzy.

Many of the works shown are noticeable for their motionless, emptiness and a sort of »temporary eternity« embodied in unspectacular moments. For example, the Brazilian artist Alice Miceli projects portraits of people who were killed in the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia in front of trickling sand. The group Multiplicity shows two video projections, placed at an angle, of a trip through the West Bank. One car trip was done with an Israeli driver, the other with a Palestinian. Although the distance was the same in each case, one trip lasted an hour, the other five-and-a-half hours. While the trip shown on the left goes rapidly over a highway with tunnels,drawing us in as if by suction, the other is wobbly and unsteady: because the Palestinian was not allowed to drive on the highways, the journey had to be carried out on gravel tracks, through street checkpoints and villages, and on foot.

The empty pictures and the empty middle of the exhibition do not show innocent zones, but historically evolved terrain that has arrived at its end. For instance, there is the Bosnian artist Maja Bajavic, who strolls about on a green field and, gesticulating and narrating in a lively manner, conjures up for us the house of her grandparents, now vanished. There are the strange white snow pictures by Thomas Köner in »Banlieu du vide«, in which only tracks remain to tell of the streets lying underneath. There is this island – Hashima – in the blue sea off the Japanese coast in the film work by Carl Michael von Hausswolff and Thomas Nordanstad, which consists solely of crumbling, grey high-rises and desolate wave breaks. Once the most densely populated island in the world, Hashima, which until 1974 was used for mining coal, has since mouldered away, like the rusting boats on the Danube filmed by the Serbian group Apsolutno: the never-realised dreams of ex-Yugoslavia to travel the high seas: »Absolutely Dead«. But precisely because these run-down spaces do not deny their historical contamination and work through it instead, they are also spaces of hope: mindful of death and ruin, exploitation and inequality, they represent possibilities for new world projects.

The special achievement of the curators of this exhibition is the way they have deliberately created collisions and allowed ruptures to stand. In this sense, two works whose approach could not be more different end up corresponding: right at the back there is a closed hut, built by Lutz Dammeck. It represents the forest cabin in which the so-called Unabomber lived, a mathematician who began to doubt the value of progress and send letter bombs. Dammbeck’s film essay »The Net« (2004) provides the necessary information. At the front entrance, on a small monitor, Maja Bajevic moves through a house and utters fundamentalist sentences: »Anyone who does not think exactly the same way must die. That is God’s will. I am his messenger.« In the system of the mathematician and in that of the fundamentalists, there is only one, deadly truth. But to generate “worldliness” (Welthaltigkeit) – as this exhibition convincingly suggests – it is necessary to have in-between worlds that allow dialogues and address the ruptures.

[b]Chaos and fragment[/b]

Whereas in »vom Verschwinden« the immaterial pictures and the empty impression given by the exhibition space symbolise such an open space of opportunity, the installation »Hole« by the Swiss artist Christoph Büchel in the Basle Kunsthalle is about working things through at a physical and psychological level. It is made unpleasantly clear at the very start of the exhibition that there is something extreme at issue here. The broad stairway is blocked off; only a manipulated lift that you have to set in motion yourself with a key provides access. The ride is extremely slow and lasts for a long time. When you arrive at the top, you enter a waiting room. Here, on a surveillance camera, there is an absurd video about a prisoner who shoots himself in his cell. Another door leads into the »innards« of the Kunsthalle – hundreds of electrical leads hang from plugs as if dead -, the other leads to a sort of psychiatrist’s office. After you have crawled out through a dirty hole in the wall and climbed up a vertical metal ladder, you end up – after going through another narrow hole – next to a toilet bowl in a tiled bathroom. It smells like a garage here, and in fact another set of stairs goes down into a huge hall in which there is a burnt-out bus destroyed by bombs, which has been patched together in a makeshift manner.
Along the walls there are dozens of shelves upon which metal parts, bags and other broken items are stored – an archive of parts that have lost their use but are neatly hoarded and arranged. Walking through this huge room is like walking through a death zone. Having reached the end, where do you go from there? Back through the seemingly far too narrow, far too steep, far too dangerous holes, stinking, sweaty, glad to have got out in one piece. The bus, which is familiar to us from television footage of the Palestinian territories or other war zones, has materialised in all its thousand parts. The old Kunsthalle, recently renovated, and now turned an end zone, thus becomes a zone for prolonged reflection. When we pass through it, the otherwise remote TV images become our own, physically experienced nightmares, deaths and memories: »I« am a part of the bus, »I« sit down on one of the burnt-out seats for a time, compare myself with the bags and metal parts and absent dead bodies. Where is a difference here? How can I categorise these thousand parts, this stench and these terrible holes? Is the system of archives and shelves, psychiatry rooms and prisons that is offered right? The way one positions oneself in this system of holes and passages, gaps and systems of order remains open – a hole.

The fact that Büchel’s work is a radical attempt to counter collective amnesias is also made apparent by the »Guantánamo Initiative«, launched together with Gianni Motti and shown at the last Venice Biennial in the Swiss Pavilion. This work tries to legally buy Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, which the US military uses for prisons housing alleged terrorists. This simple intention to buy, which counts on the global language of the power of money, superficially tries to intervene actively in the terrorism and territorial policies of the USA. But the documents shown in the exhibition make the background clear as well, and call to mind something that disappears in the »fight against evil«: the fact that a world power is publicly acting on the verge of lawlessness. This work is thus not cynical, as some have claimed, but a placebo against forgetting and a symbolic proposal for possible action in an era of global capitalism.

[b]Mapping and informing[/b]

The four-year project »Projekt Migration« and the resulting exhibition in Cologne are pioneering endeavours with regard to the transdisciplinary approach to blind spots in the cultural history of a nation.1 »Projekt Migration«, presented at four different venues, brings together socio-historical research and art works on so-called »Gastarbeit« (»guest labour«) in West Germany or »Vertragsarbeit« (»contract labour« in the former East Germany, as well as on the present-day EU border policies. The curators have succeeded in integrating art, supplemented by the dialogue with the documentary and informative sections, as a central, atmospheric and physically effective way of passing on information. In contrast to the exhibition design based on the information aesthetic, there are a number of works that are different in an unpretentious way: for example, there is a wallpapered wooden wall with newspaper clippings and a child’s drawing, surrounded by half-rotted carpets, a bird cage and other cheap household items. We all know scenes like this model-like installation from the series »Gastarbeiter – Fremdarbeiter« (»Foreign Worker – Alien Worker«) by Vlassis Cassaris from 1974, but it is astounding all the same how little they have been integrated into the dominant art history of the present day. Good research has been done here in discovering many artistic projects that already focused on the topic of migration several years ago: for example, Candida Höfer’s photo series »Turks in Germany« and Zelimir Zilnik’s 16-mm film »Inventur –Metzstrasse 11« (»Inventory – Metzstrasse 11«). In addition, however, new projects are also made possible, such as »MigMag – Governing Migration. Kartographie zu europäischer Migrationspolitik« by Labor k3000, which opposes a completely different cartography to the usual maps of »migration streams«. It becomes apparent not only that art has always taken part in social life in specific ways, but also that it often chooses other representations of migration and migrants than the usual ones. It shows – and this is one of the aims of the exhibition as well – migration as a living culture, a reality of various lifestyles and models of action under particular political and economic conditions.

If there is anything that these different exhibitions have in common, then it is not only their attempt to work through collective amnesias and to participate in the lives of others, but also the desire to use art to point out alternative possibilities to those that are already present anyway.

1 See the critique in the review section of this issue.

The exhibition »vom Verschwinden. Weltfluchten und Weltverluste« was on display from August 27 to September 30 2005 in the Hartware MedienKunstVerein in the Phoenix-Halle in Dortmund. An accompanying book was published by Revolver Verlag. The exhibition »Christoph Büchel – HOLE« in the Basle Kunsthalle ran from September 18 to November 6 2005, »Projekt Migration« in Cologne from September 30 2005 to January 15 2006. A publication of the same name also accompanied the latter exhibition.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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