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7/4/2003

Trade Routes

Ifa-gallery, Bonn

Cultural Routes
Visas, or the Impediments to Travelling

Emeka Udemba (Nigeria), Marcos Lora Read (Dominican Republic), Tanja Ostojic (Serbia), Edgar Endress (Chile)

Atlases, maps and globes have always fascinated artists as they give information on the political and historical lay of a country or continent - in addition to the merely factual representations of the positions of continents, national borders and geographical features. The map as an 'objet trouvé' has therefore inspired artists to a wide range of creations.

Most recently, with the same intense (albeit highly ambivalent) interest, a number of artists have investigated the forms and documents of various national bureaucracies concerned with defining nationalities and borders, i.e. identity papers, residence permits and visas. These documents now function as contemporary cartographic tools and often give a more accurate picture of the current socio-political international order than any world atlas.

To all appearances, the contemporary traveller crosses various national and provincial borders effortlessly and within a few hours. Following the fall of the Iron Curtain and the extension of the European Union, travelling within Europe has become much easier. However, this freedom is only available to those who are citizens of central and western European countries or are of other 'privileged' nationalities. For all others, travelling is a more arduous affair, as the European Union's domestic opening has been accompanied by it increasingly shutting its doors to people and goods from non-member countries.

Prior to travelling, i.e. entering EU territory, every non-EU citizen must submit proof of integrity. As the French ethnologist Marc Augé has so appropriately put it: 'The passenger gains his anonymity (and with it his freedom of movement) [...] only after he has proved his identity [...]. In a certain sense [... you are] constantly asked to prove your innocence.' In this assessment 'innocence', apart from 'liquidity' also means 'proper' origin. This is why the anonymity that guarantees freedom of movement is often an exclusively western capitalist prerogative.

Increasingly, artists are becoming professional foreign travellers and, unlike many of their compatriots, are able to legitimise their journeys with official invitations. They are expected and welcomed abroad. Yet many artists from non-European or East European countries have probably turned to addressing global migration movements and 'travel-prevention' strategies because they have had unpleasant experiences as travellers from the 'wrong' countries of origin.

The step from individual experience to general, critical, analysis of the current political situation is a short one.

The Serb artist Tanja Ostojic, for example, chose a much practiced, but 'unbureaucratic' path: several hundred eligible bachelors actually responded to her internet project 'Looking for a Husband with EU Passport' with which she 'married'

art and real life with the utmost consistency: after marrying one of her suitors and happily settling in West Europe, she is now - consistently - working on the next step, her three-year 'Integration Project' which is the second of her works included in this exhibition.

'Visas' is one of the topical, contemporary ifa exhibitions on the subject of 'trade routes / cultural routes' and is dedicated to modern itineraries and modes of travelling as well as to national bureaucratic strategies of 'travel prevention' which have become even more important since September 11, 2001. The exhibition presents four artistic positions from different regions around the globe: Nigeria (West Africa), the Dominican Republic (West Indies), Chile (Latin America) and Serbia (East Europe). Some of the exhibits deal with the objects, or means, of travel prevention (e.g. Emeka Udemba's photos of the waiting rooms in foreign embassies in Lagos), others express the subject in a transformed, translated way.

The Chilean artist Edgar Endress acts less like somebody directly involved and more like a visibly analytical observer and an archivist of individual biographies, or stories of illegal migrants from Haiti or the Dominican Republic to their chosen homeland, the United States. His project on current migrations in the West Indies is juxtaposed to one by Marcos Lora Read on the notorious slave-trade route via Santo Domingo to the United States navigated already in the 18th century. Read, this year's representative of the Dominican Republic at the Venice Biennale, creates installations and objects addressing the homelessness of many emigrants also against this historic background.

Image:
Tanja Ostojic
Illegal Border Crossing, 2000
Action at the Slovene-Austrian border
Videostills

ifa-Gallery Bonn
April 9 - Juni 1, 2003
Opening: April 8, 2003, 8 p.m.

Opening hours
Tuesday to Friday 12 am to 6 pm
Saturday, Sunday 12 am to 5 pm
Admission free

IFA Gallery BONN
Willy-Brandt-Allee 9
53113 Bonn
phone +49.228.224450
fax +49.228.212251

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