Adrian Paci, Centro di Permanenza Temporanea (Temporary Detention Centre), 2007

walid raad, lecture, Beirut 2005

Simon Critchley: 'There's no justice without terror' - video

Lines of Control

More than forty works of video, prints, photographs, paintings, sculpture, and installation by international artists delve into the past and explore the present to expose the seductive simplicity of drawing lines as a substitute for learning how to live with each other. Living within and across these lines can be a messy, bloody business but also offers a productive space where new nations, identities, languages, and relationships are forged.

At its core, Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space investigates the historic upheaval of the 1947 partition of India that spawned the nations of Pakistan and later Bangladesh. The exhibition is part of an ongoing project initiated in 2005 by Green Cardamom, a London-based nonprofit arts organization. Expanding on the significance of partition in South Asia, Lines of Control at the Johnson Museum also addresses physical and psychological borders, trauma, and the reconfiguration of memory in other partitioned areas: North and South Korea, Sudan and South Sudan, Israel and Palestine, Ireland and Northern Ireland, Armenia and its diaspora, and questions of indigenous sovereignty in the United States. The exhibition explores the products and remainders of partition and borders characteristic of the modern nation-state, and includes the continued impact of colonization, the physical and psychic violence of displacement, dilemmas of identity and belonging, and questions of commemoration.

Artists represented in the exhibition are Bani Abidi, Francis Alÿs, Sarnath Banerjee, Farida Batool, Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Muhanned Cader, Duncan Campbell, Iftikhar Dadi, DAAR, Anita Dube, Taghreed Elsanhouri, Sophie Ernst, Gauri Gill, Shilpa Gupta, Zarina Hashmi, Emily Jacir, Ahsan Jamal, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Amar Kanwar, Noa Lidor, Mario Mabor, Nalini Malani, Naeem Mohaiemen, Tom Molloy, Rashid Rana, Raqs Media Collective, Jolene Rickard, Hrair Sarkissian, Seher Shah, Surekha, Hajra Waheed, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, and Muhammad Zeeshan.

Learned Homeland

1996, installation, public space

A project by Martin Krenn & Oliver Ressler for Neue Galerie, Graz

In Austria, the concept of homeland is implemented not only regionally but also on a supra-regional and state level. This is meant to facilitate and force the citizens’ emotional attachment to the state. This type of manipulation already takes place in the school institution “Learned Homeland”/”Gelernte Heimat” attempts to illustrate these “nativizing strategies” with Austrian school books. The construction of “homeland” is particularly vivid in school books.

In creating collective identities through the concept of homeland, the “own” is always valued against the “other” and in this way demarcated from it. The “own” history is glorified, or even falsified. “Natural beauty” is pulled in for symbolization and concretization of the “Austria homeland” and used to produce a sense of the citizens’ ties to the “homeland.”

Through the early influence of the state school institution on the pupils, equating Austria with homeland is deemed natural. This leads to a situation in which an obviously constructed sense of homeland is seen as a natural fundamental human necessity and is hardly ever questioned.

Poster object at the main square:

Two school book pages expanded with blocks of text and an announcement of the exhibition in the Neue Galerie animated observers to confront the construction of a homeland-concept using their own school experiences. Interviews with passers-by reading the texts on the posters were carried out and recorded on video.

Exhibition in the Neue Galerie:

In the first room of the exhibition, the video documentation of the reactions of those passing by and reading the posters was shown. On display in the next two rooms were twelve Bubblejet prints, which thematized further examples of homeland constitution found in the school textbooks.

Presented in the fourth room was the video “Learned Homeland – Working Talks”/”Gelernte Heimat – Arbeitsgespräche”. This video includes theorists from Austria and Germany who have published texts on racism and homeland.

Interviews were carried out with: Jost Müller, Nora Räthzel, Juliane Rebentisch, Mark Terkessidis, Vera Kockot, Herbert Nikitsch/Bernhard Tschofen and Walter Manoschek.

The conversations expand the content of the theme by pointing out the relationship between homeland and racism in Austria and Germany.

Call the Witness - Migration

MIGRATION from Milutin Jovanovic on Vimeo.

Call the Witness - Migration

jayce salloum at canadian cultural centre, paris

Glasgow International Let's Get Lyrical Event

Glasgow International Let's Get Lyrical Event from GI Festival on Vimeo.

Hito Steyerl on Minorities

'Minorities are not primarily defined by their small number, but by their incompatibility with pre-existing categories of identity' from the Empty Center translated by John Southard

'The City' Constantine P. Cavafy (1910), translations

You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,

find another city better than this one.

Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong

and my heart lies buried as though it were something dead.

How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?

Wherever I turn, wherever I happen to look,

I see the black ruins of my life, here,

where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.

This city will always pursue you. You will walk

the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods,

will turn gray in these same houses.

You will always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:

there is no ship for you, there is no road.

As you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,

you’ve destroyed it everywhere else in the world.

Translated by Edmund Keeley/Philip Sherrard

You tell yourself: I'll be gone
To some other land, some other sea,
To a city lovelier far than this
Could ever have been or hoped to be -
Where every step now tightens the noose:
A heart in a body buried and out of use:
How long, how long must I be here
Confined among these dreary purlieus
Of the common mind? Wherever now I look
Black ruins of my life rise into view.
So many years have I been here
Spending and squandering, and nothing gained.
There's no new land, my friend, no
New sea; for the city will follow you,
In the same streets you'll wander endlessly,
The same mental suburbs slip from youth to age,
In the same house go white at last -
The city is a cage.
No other places, always this
Your earthly landfall, and no ship exists
To take you from yourself.
Ah! don't you see
Just as you've ruined your life in this
One plot of ground you've ruined its worth
Everywhere now - over the whole earth?

Translated by Lawrence Durrell (in the novel Justine)

la memoire dure (memory resists)- Rossella Ragazzi

Ibrahim lived with his uncle in the woods in Mali, for a few days he attended Koran school. Alpha comes from Liberia, and during the war his family was dispersed. Nawel lived in Algeria where his large family was forced to have him adopted and taken to France. All these children attended the same preparation class for learning French in a compulsory school in Paris that is aimed at inserting them as soon as possible in normal primary school classes. For 9 months, the film director filmed these children, showing how they were received in France and the relationship established between teachers and pupils. The children learn not only the language but also the values of their host society.