March 15th, 2009 | 2009, works
Liquid Frontiers – Festival Lille3000 – 14.03. – 12.07.2009
Libia Castro & Ólafur Ólafsson - Video still from Caregivers
LIQUID FRONTIERS
The exhibition Liquid Frontiers is one of the main components of the Invisible Borders project displayed at Tri Postal in Lille within the wider Europe XXL Festival organized by Lille3000.
14.03. – 12.07.2009
Opening – March 14th 2009, 3 pm at Tri Postal, Avenue Willy Brandt, 59000 Lille, France
Participants: AES + F; Maja Bajevic; Pierre Bismuth; Libia Castro and Olafur Olafsson; Blue Noses; Pavel Braila; Luchezar Boyadjiev; Artistarh Chernishev; Nina Fisher and Maroan El Sani; Vadim Fishkin; Lise Harlev; Irwin; Oleg Kulik; Cristina Lucas; Deimantas Narkevicius; Carsten Nicolai; Vladimir Nikolic; Roman Ondak; Adrian Paci; Sean Snyder; Nedko Solakov; Monika Sosnowka; Krassimir Terziev; Clemens Von Wedemeyer.
Curator: Iara Boubnova
The exhibition “Liquid Frontiers” presents a selection of artistic positions that explore the nature and the substance of what a border means today in the context of Europe, which is renewing itself. In the process of transformation over the last twenty years no artist in Europe has been left unconcerned or untouched, in one way or another, by the necessity to rethink frontiers. The artists in this event are engaging with the physical, the visual, the spiritual, the economic, the political, the metaphysical and even the interpersonal levels and realms of one formerly stable notion, a notion that is undergoing a significant alteration.
Ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall nearly twenty years ago, the various borders and frontiers in the continent have never lost their presence or liquidity, to use a term from the world of finance. Yet they are shifting and rearranging themselves – from the ever-changing visa regulations to the rarely changing physical borders and all the way to the nearly disappearing frontiers whenever the market, investment and the consumption of goods are concerned. The borders and frontiers of and in Europe are ever more “liquid” – they are there and not there at the same time, they are defining us but they are being defined by us, they are there to overcome and yet they are there to protect.
The artists and works in this exhibition are engaged in or comment upon these processes. Sometimes through confrontation with the political or urban reality, sometimes through poetic interpretation of the effects borders and frontiers have on the individual; occasionally through recording and documenting and yet in other cases through emulation of frontiers in an art work; sometimes the goal is critique and analysis, at other – irony and laughter; sometimes the artist in the selection would narrate a real-life story while at other the story would be the product of an active imagination trying to make sense of a complex reality.
The artistic approaches in this exhibition while not exhausting all the various practices employed in the last few years, are yet representative of the ways artists, mainly but not only from the Eastern part of the continent, are acknowledging their new attitudes to frontiers now. Many a time the process of thinking is a process of trying to overcome a frontier much as an explorer would do.