2023-06-02 15:09:49
Nnot you and me “We” is meant. So somehow all together. We, who were once called the Federal Republic and the GDR, who were once “the people” and then the “Pope” and have long since ceased to be soccer world champions, with statistically certified 11.82 million foreigners, but still something like European champions. And now we also have the show about us. “Who we are” – without a question mark. An invitation to the decisive We-Balance in the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn. Promises are louder “looks at the structures of our migration society”.
The Polish-born artist Alicja Kwade came to Germany in 1987 and was immediately confronted with linguistic essentials when she was naturalized. Your first name is not really Germanophile. The authority proposes “Alice”. That’s what the “structures” are like. And now what remains of the passport official Germanization is a thoughtful video work that processes the experience of the reality of migration society in two dozen poetic portraits. All are called “Alice” in the film. And of course there is Alice in Wonderland. But the way we remember the Wunderland story, you only get there at best, never as a we-society.
One could have imagined the whole thing to be less lucid and a little more saturated with discourse. There is no mention of urgent migration policy problems. After all, migration is not a special case, they say, but rather the norm, “at any time and anywhere in the world”. Which isn’t wrong. In fact, since time immemorial, man has been on the move as if he had to run away from his simian past. Whereby the genuine fate of the nomads appears somewhat simple as the basis of knowledge for a current we-balance sheet.
Helpless federal-state conferences find no response in the show, municipal efforts, let alone over-exertion no appreciation. The fact that overwhelmed administrations are not only busy with the Germanization of foreign-sounding first names is not an issue. Not a word, not a picture about triumphant migrant clans, teacher shortages, ghetto-like refusals of basic assimilation. At times, reading through the exhibition, it feels like church convention rhetoric.
Welcoming culture then and now
And there, in the comfort zone of pious mass entertainment, Adel Abdessemed’s film work would also find its understanding audience. The production by the Algerian artist is called “The Sea”. He kneels on a board in the raging sea, struggling to keep his balance and to top it all off he writes the two words “Politically Correct”. Anyone who has saved the images of the corpses, clothes and debris from the tug boat, which was recently washed ashore in the spring storms off the Ionian island of Crotone, must have found the artistic self-experiment more like a fatal stage adaptation.
It is entirely meritorious to once again illustrate the recent history of migration from the perspective of the victims. Especially since the artistic testimonies are all from the Documentation Center and Museum of Migration in Germany (DOMiD) which was founded by migrants in 1990 and is to find a permanent home in a disused industrial hall in Cologne-Kalk over the next few years. “Who we are” is also a test of the power of collection.
You stand at the train station and watch the guest worker trains that brought Italian and Turkish workers to West Germany in the 1960s, as if from afar. Or “over there” the Vietnamese “contract workers”, as they were expelled from the socialist brother country at Schönefeld Airport. Photo documents from the “welcome culture” of 2015, from the exuberant distribution of teddy bears to Syrian, Afghan and Iraqi children. Or memories of pithy politicians’ prose: “I can’t get a Turk across the border anymore” (Helmut Schmidt, Federal Chancellor, 1982). All this is not without impression and contributes more to the shamed sense of unity than many an artistic contribution to the debate.
At least that’s an impression that Rirkrit Tiravanija’s cabinet is hesitant to make. He wrote three walls with monster letters “FREEDOM YOU CAN’T SIMULATE”. A sentence that does not withstand deep philosophical exploration for too long. However, the shrine with sausages in front of it deserves even less attention, the natural casings of which are said to contain minced lamb and beef with pages torn from Thilo Sarrazin’s bestseller “Germany Abolishes Itself”.
Sometimes one wishes for a little more ambiguity, not to speak of groundlessness. But that doesn’t fit into the low-threshold concept, which can also be proud of the simple language and cultural accessibility. In front of the outstretched fist arms of the South African performance artist Lerato Shadi, there is actually no need for clarifying words. Everyone understands the protest symbol.
Just as one willingly goes to the language laboratory of the Turkish artist Ülkü Süngün, who, against the background of the NSU terror, rehearses the correct pronunciation of the victims’ names with the audience. And the Syrian artist Manaf Halbouni does not have to be too routine in dealing with contemporary visual language either. The fact that the Arabic character before the five letters “ULTUR” has to be a “K” is acknowledged as a bit of an understatement.
It must be a K: exhibit by Syrian artist Manaf Halbouni
Source: © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023/Foto Stiftung Kulturstadt Soest
Works that all use their different means, languages, codes and signs to document the mood and sensitivity of the guests, their view of the hosts, their interests, idiosyncrasies, prejudices and language rules, the interpretive sovereignty that postcolonial Europe still claims for itself . And even if some criticism seems to lose its accusing tone in the poetic performance – as in the surreal ghost figures that Serkan Sarier has fighting invisible powers on his monumental panels – then the experience of discrimination is always palpable, the hostility of the foreign homeland , everyday racism.
Afro-American artist Carrie Mae Weems stands as a figure from behind in a black dress in front of the intimidating portal of the British Museum in London. The people in front of her are thronging, hurrying towards the gate. The artist lets everything happen, remains in an existential detachment, as it were, petrified as a sign of her non-belonging – a monument, as it were, of proud self-confidence in the wrong life.
It is inevitable that the rapid Time.news of events only touches on some things that deserve more political reasoning and not just cursory narration. It is perhaps a difference whether the epoch of the economic miracle barracked the emaciated workers from the south of Italy in barracks or whether a not inconsiderable part of our society accepts without perceptible excitement that being a Jew has once again become a risk to life in this country.
“Decorative Pillow” with Daniel Josefsohn
Source: © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023/Courtesy Galerie Crone, Berlin Vienna/Photo David Prior
At the very least, the anti-Semitic resentment deserved a clearer accent in the meritorious account of who we are. The “decorative cushion” with Daniel Josefsohn’s inscription “Israeli, Jew / now also / severely disabled / it must be possible to commercialize it in / Germany /” is certainly a beautifully cynical reflex, but doesn’t reveal much of the trauma of increasing danger.
If the who-we-are visitors spend the longest, the most thoughtful time in front of the large-format “world map” by Roma artist Damian le Bas, the exhibition has at least achieved its educational goal. You won’t find any structure in the jumble of masks, arrows, eyes, coins, no drift, no logic to explain the chaos. You stand in front of an image of insurmountable homelessness.
The globe with its firmly divided continents, countries and regions, as we think we know them, is deceptive. In truth, everything is in motion. And the figure of thought and feeling of one’s own nationality has always collided with the reality of being on the move.
Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, until October 8th
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