23.-25. April 2021 Supplementary objects and materials physically viewable alongside the screened presentation

Geöffnet von 12 bis 18 Uhr / Open from 12 to 6pm
Haus der Statistik, Haus B, Otto-Braun-Straße 70-72, 10178 Berlin

Please note: Visitors have to provide a negative antigen test result from the same day.

Originating with an early proposal to read crisis through the long-term lens of ‘Majnoon Field’, the question of inhabiting the uninhabitable arrives at the ruins of the Beirut port explosion. Around the same time, the infamous Moria refugee camp on Lesvos burns to the ground. Fieldwork in both places is accessed in the midst of pandemic. One could say that being present in the field occurs within the scope of ‘artistic research’ while acknowledging that distancing measures are instrumentalized for police and military control. Proximity is forbidden at arrival points along the shores of Lesvos, and it becomes nearly impossible to witness EU border aggressions on land and sea. Neither is it allowed to look for too long at the militarized refugee camp, whose flimsy shelters do not offer minimum protection for those who enter the system as POCs (or ‘persons of concern’, per UN parlance). Furthermore, if ‘artistic research’ is made possible via extensive logistics and planning, it is rather ignited by the unpredictabilities and the immediate responses that make navigating the field an experience of heightened contextual awareness.

This presentation will give accounts of origin and arrival, of medium regarding method, and of the hypervisibility (or in/visibility) of non-European bodies prompting authoritarian harassment and violence. Mode of inquiry seeks multiple points of intersection, asking whether ‘artistic research’ can cultivate conditions for arrival in spaces of shared emancipation.

Display in collaboration with Ilke Penzlien