OFF FENCE in Art laboratory Berlin: left Camilo Ontiveros, CAUTION: the freeway interventions (2005); right Katya Gardea Browne, Tijuana Girl Crossing (2009)
Summer is in the air, the first very hot days in Berlin are here. Still, there is a few time to go before the institutionalised art world seems to fall asleep, at least that was the case last year...this year seems more promising as the Berlin Biennale is still to be viewed till the beginning of August.
Luckily there are some shows that i visited the last period that i think worth mentioning, among these a concert by Michael Edgerton in Hotel 25 in Kreuzberg, Berlin and the exhibition OFF FENCE in Art Laboratory Berlin.
OFF FENCE is a show in Art Laboratory Berlin in Berlin Wedding 'exploring the cultural overflow, overlap and tensions in the border region of Southern California and Northwest Mexico'. Participating artists are Michelle Chong, Luis G. Hernandez, Ed Gomez, Camilo Ontiveros and Katya Gardea Browne.
Migration and mobility are hard themes in current international culture and politics. I remember an impressive work of Paul Virilio that i saw in the spring of 2009 in the Cartier Foundation in Paris which showed in a video installation the data of migration all around the world: by literally showing streams and numbers each natural disaster and violent conflict produced its refugees to other parts of the world. In Europe or the US the inhabitants mostly only get in touch with this by absctract news messages, at EU and USA borders it is a daily reality.
Photo: Camilo Ontiveros
The works of the five artists use different media than Virilio, they seem to personalize more a situation in which poor people are trying to get in the richer 'fenced' parts of the world. The drama of this situation each participating artist expresses differently. Camilo Ontiveros' 'Caution' is the result of a public intervention: by adding texts to freeway signs around the US-Mexican border of crossing people over the road, Ontiveros uses the signs to make the daily reality for the drivers a bit more harsh. The fact that there are refugees that (mostly illegally) cross the road and need to be warned for to drivers is already a gotspe 'an sich'. His added texts as 'WANTED', 'FREE MARKET' or 'NO BENEFITS' might be hoping to wake up the drivers along the highway, the doubt that this will lead to any change seems justified making the situation even more painful for the sensitive soul. The signs (unintentionally?) also show up in a scene in a film recorded at the American-Mexican border, Ontiveros shows a loop of this scene of around 25 seconds.
Katya Gardea Browne is showing the video installation Tijuana Girl Crossing (2009). The use of super 8 camera's and post production create blurry images reminding of surveillance camera's. The girl is not identifiable, the surrounding landscape might be around a border, but could be also somewhere else. The fact that the installation is shown in an exhibition with the title 'OFF FENCE' might limit the perception of the work in the beginning, as the meaning of the images seems to be fixed. The Images though are so rich that i soon forget about the context of the galery and start to look intensively at the split screen. Again, the choice of the medium is an important one and used here in an enriching way.
