Stuttgart. It would be difficult to come up with a clearer representation of the disappearance and continued existence of the East-West divide: at the entrance to the exhibition »On Difference #2« there is a map upon which can be seen the entrance to the square exhibition space. Looking through the opened door, one’s eye falls upon the base of the Dimitrov Mausoleum in Sofia, blown up in 1999, which appears at the same time via Bluetooth on the mobile phones of the exhibition visitors in the work by Petko Dourmana. Whereas this monument, built for posterity, now remains present only in virtual form, in the real entrance to the hall there appears a large projection of a twenty-dollar bill. Upon close inspection, one can distinguish the figure of a small painter gradually painting over all the windows of the White House depicted on the banknote.
This work by Joon Ho Jeon is part of the project »Middle Corea«, which Nathalie Boseul Shin, one of six curators, has contributed to the exhibition. In the two-kilometre-wide No-Man’s-Land between North and South Korea, the project group has come up with a counter-model between East and West. The flag, uniforms and citizenship that can be freely obtained on a website call into question the insignia of the nation-state.1
As an imaginary space, »Middle Corea« breaks up long-established mental blocks, without aiming at any direct impact on reality. As a complete contrast, Judit Angel’s contribution as curator presents activist approaches in the form of several video works and a central temple of the young Budapest squatter scene. Here, symbols like the clenched fist, and even the exhibition itself, shift into an ambivalent position midway between »movement« and semi-official representation. In the segment put together by Galia Dimitrova, two works examine the power of media and the paradoxes of counter-strategies in a somewhat different way: the actor Javor Gardev appears as Major Stefanov in the real surroundings of Bulgarian television programmes, while the artists’ group X-Tendo turns the crowds in the underground into extras at a demonstration and contrasts this with original pictures from the Sofia of the seventies.
The title »On Difference« is not meant to be taken as referring to irreconcilable national differences, but rather to a »game of differences« in Derrida’s sense, a game that shifts and redraws borders. As a paradigm for this, at the centre of »Middle Corea« there is the portrait of a female citizen of vaguely oriental appearance wearing a headscarf, by the Indian artist Riyas Kami. Alenka Gregori_, in her contribution, very deliberately chose works from various cities of the former Yugoslavia to which the curator feels a bond of common identity beyond all national divisions.
The role of the image and art also come under scrutiny in this exhibition. In his contribution, »4 br«, Ricardo Basbaum presents four projects that have not come to international attention via the biennials. They include a successful, carnivalesque protest by artists against the construction of a Guggenheim Museum in Rio de Janeiro which, as Basbaum says, would have consumed more public subsidies than all local artistic activities together.
In the project by the Raqs Media Collective, no artists speak at all in the narrower sense, but instead an architect, filmmakers and authors, scientists from different disciplines and an Internet magazine.2 The result is an interdisciplinary answer to the challenges of the post-colonial metropolis for which only the terrain of art provides room, if it reaches out beyond the white cube of the museum: contemporary art in India reaches only a small minority. Meanwhile, as Nancy Adajania shows in her contribution, a wide audience is tinkering away at its own visual world in Photoshop: the local is resisting the normative effect of global technology.
Translated by Timothy Jones