[spectre] Geography and the Politics of Mobility

[ewen@altern.org]

Geography and the Politics of Mobility 
exhibition and events 

Bureau d'etudes / Frontera Sur RRVT / makrolab / multiplicity / Raqs media collective 

Generali Foundation, Vienna http://foundation.generali.at 
guest curator: Ursula Biemann 

exhibition January 17 - April 27, 2003 

January 16, opening, 19:00 

January 18, lectures and talks 

16:00  Maps for the Outside, lecture by Brian Holmes, art critic, Paris 
17:00  panel with Raqs, Marko Peljhan, makrolab, multiplicity and Ursula Biemann, moderated by Gerald Raunig, republicart. 
19:00  Engendering Terror, lecture by Irit Rogoff, Goldsmith College, London 

The exhibition pursues questions around the transformative quality of location and geographies at a time of hightened mobility in which subjects are no longer bound to one place. Transitory existences increasingly constitute and transform the space that they cross or temporarily occupy due to migration or new working conditions. Human trajectories but also the traffic of signs, goods and visual information form particular cultural, social and virtual landscapes which inscribe themselves materially in the terrain. 

In a directly geographical sense, the exhibition traces the logic of human economic circuits within a changed world order: the feminized teleservice industry in India, illegal refugee boats crossing the Mediterranean, smuggling routes over theSpanish-Moroccan border. On a different plane, geography may also be understood as a thought model that allows for a complex and spatial reflection about societal transformations and concepts of boundaries, connectivity and transgression. 

The five collective projects make different proposals of a geographical practice, both in the way they operate as a network, and in their aesthetic strategy with regard to a politics of space. By juxtaposing electronic and material landscapes, the art projects address systems both of representation and of navigation. The exhibition thus brings together connective and transgressive artistic practices: on the one hand it takes a critical look at an increasingly consolidating Europe and its borders, while on the other it presents emerging formations of artistic and activist counter-geographies. 

The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication in German and English with texts by Ursula Biemann, Irit Rogoff, Lisa Parks, Brian Holmes and the artists.