Bleiben oder gehen / Staying or leaving

”Staying or leaving“ – the question arises against the backdrop of a world that is constantly reorganising, in which migration no longer appears only as a phenomenon of flight caused by political or economical necessity, but has come to be a constant in the question of identities, a form of permanent surveying and exploration of the cultural territory.

Staying or leaving puts eight artistic projects into a temporary context within the framework for the duration of the exhibition: for the artists featured at the exhibition, the key theme of their work and point of departure for their projects is to explore possibilities and drafts of social coexistence, concepts and utopias of belonging, experiences of uprooting and endangerment, and their politically or economically motivated conditions. They describe processes in which living space – private or communal, permanent or temporary – is negotiated, and they refer to very specific geographical, historical and social situations and may be seen as strategic navigation through cultural landscapes. Landscapes, buildings and situations in life – the factual object of these works – form a panorama in which the conflict zones of our generations and of generations past coincide: the colonial struggles for power that characterised the past century, the failure of social utopias and the ”internationalisation of people and cultures“ that are founded equally in post-socialism and late capitalism. In the Staying or leaving projects, these conflicts are manifest or lie, barely concealed, below a thin layer of the familiar.

So these are not accounts of journeys describing what someone has seen and experienced in foreign lands – on the contrary: here the focus is on places and situations in one's own area of life, where we observe rupture lines of individual, cultural and geographical belonging, lines along which stories evolve and social self-conception becomes visible.

Kuratorin / Kurator: Christine Frisinghelli
Kuratorin / Kurator: Sandra Krizic Roban
Künstlerin / Künstler / Gruppe: Ana Husman
Künstlerin / Künstler / Gruppe: Oliver Musovik
Künstlerin / Künstler / Gruppe: Maria Papadimitriou
Künstlerin / Künstler / Gruppe: Dan Panaitescu
Künstlerin / Künstler / Gruppe: Randa Shaath
Künstlerin / Künstler / Gruppe: Ahlam Shibli
Künstlerin / Künstler / Gruppe: Efrat Shvily
Künstlerin / Künstler / Gruppe: Mladen Stilinovic