No Place - like Home. Perspectives on migration in Europe

15.04.08 - 21.06.08 / Tuesday - Saturday / 12:00 - 19:00

The group exhibition No Place - like Home: Perspectives on Migration in Europe features eighteen Belgian and international artists. Their videos, photographic works and installations take a closer look at what lies under the surface of the migration issue. Migration is a thing of all ages. Where Europeans once colonized various continents and emigrated en masse to other lands both in and beyond their own continent, movement from the opposite direction has now taken hold. Capital, goods and information circulate freely in the late-capitalist, globalized world economy. For people, however, mobility is arranged somewhat differently. Borders and territories are still the primary expression of national sovereignty, however multiethnic populations may have become. For Europe – which permanently shifts between regulating, even attracting, and then repelling strangers – these are the outer borders, the so-called Schengenland regions. No Place - like Home (note the hyphen) investigates how inner and outer space, how 'we' and 'they' maintain complex relations with one another and the frictions this generates.

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Martirosyan / Bucher / Farocki
Reframing History

15.05.08 / Thursday / 21:30
Cinema Arenberg Brussels

These three recent works reframe and redefine history. They re-interpret images and testimonies going back to three ideological spaces: Stalinism, late capitalism and fascism.
1937 investigates the parallels between the history of a nation and an individual story within that country’s history. 1937 was the year of theStalinist purges in Yerevan, a city in what was then Soviet Armenia. Nora Martirosyan provides a fictional report of a political arrest. In the1930s, the filmmaker’s grandmother was a young girl. Sixty-nine years later, she tells her own personal story about the arrest. With the aid of an allegorical text by Franz Kafka, in Forever Live: The Case of K. Gun, François Bucher takes a metaphoric look at a true event that took place before the second UN resolution on the invasion of Iraq: a security leak by a translator. In the silent essayfilm, Respite, historic footage of the Nazi transit camp at Westerbork,the Netherlands, form the basis for Farocki’s sampling of visualarcheology.

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Ursula Biemann
The Maghreb Connection: Counter-geographies in the Sahara

22.05.08 / Thursday / 20:30

Since the fortification of the European outer rim and the pressure put on Maghreb countries to stem migration from the South, the Sahara basin has become a contested zone of mobility. We are witnessing large-scale geographic reconfigurations activated by growing and highly flexible practices of migration, proficient at rerouting, reorganizing or moving covertly in record time. Diverting attention from the current fascination with power geographies and repressive border regimes, The Maghreb Connection (2005-2007), a collaborative research and exhibition project based in Cairo, explores the counter-geographies constituted by clandestine operating systems, innovative practices of resistance and migratory self-determination. Biemann also introduces Sahara Chronicle, a video collection on the post-colonial entanglements that underlie the current sub-Saharan exodus towards Europe. Ursula Biemann (1955, Zurich) is an artist, theorist and curator. She has produced a considerable body of work about migration, mobility, technology and gender. She works as a researcher at the Institute for Art and Design Theory in Zurich.

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Sofie Benoot
Fronterismo

29.04.08-10.05.08

A journey along the border between the Unites States and Mexico. Rio Grande and Rio Bravo are two names for one river, a line in the sand, but also a line in the imagination, between the leftovers of the past and the now of the future. The border is a place in the state of mind of America, the motion of the journey, of the encounter, of the potential of change as opposed to isolation, exclusion and the static quality of the border. Four people report on the border problems in this desolate frontier region. Benoot’s slow, sometimes almost meditative visualization of this photogenic location produces stunning images of abandoned roads, ghost towns, whimsical desert landscapes and rock formations and lonely, curving rivers.
Sofie Benoot (1985) travelled to the area as part of her final project at the audiovisual arts department of the Sint-Lukas Academy in Brussels.

2007, 40', video, colour, English & Spanish with Dutch subtitles