The exhibition Passages
unites the works of two artists, Antonia Bisig and Bashar Alhroub, that address
different aspects of flight, uprooting, ephemerality and impermanence. As a
Palestinian, Bashar Alhroub is only too familiar with the essential insecurity
of existence. The figures in his video No
Time No Place appear ghost-like, indistinguishable and scarcely recognisable
as humans. In in a shadow world of black and grey they move back and forth in
strange patterns, unclear in their relations to one another. We do not know
whether they are caught up in friendly exchanges or whether they are engaged in
hostilities of some kind. They remain impossible to fully grasp. If we extend
this thought, they also seem to reflect our own feelings of insecurity faced
with the unfathomable and our search for comprehension and stability and in
this they seem uncannily familiar.
While the
figures in Bashar Alhroub’s video appear almost abstract, Antonia Bisig’s work
confronts us with very real human beings. The artist gives the shadows faces
and histories and obliges the onlooker to acknowledge these. With great detail
she draws four women and a child in a moment on their flight. According to the
title, they are refugees from Srebrenica,
on their way to Germany, fleeing the war in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. But
they could just as easily be refugees fleeing Syria now to seek shelter in
Europe. The images are similar, then and now. In her series Menschen Bilder Krieg (“Humans
Images War“) Antonia Bisig also wanted to confront her own inclination to repression;
through the intensive process of drawing she sought to address what she felt
more inclined to ignore and thus to face her own helplessness. This process is
mirrored in the intensity of her drawings. An intensity that has an almost
bodily effect on us and that makes it impossible to turn away in indifference.
The works of the two artists are not
new works. They were not realised under the impression of recent events. And
yet, they might just as easily refer to the Here and Now. With the exhibition
Passages we would like to take a stand against the violence that forces people
to leave their homes and at the same time to call for an open reception of the
refugees who find their way to our city. We invite our audience to confront
their own feelings of helplessness when faced with misery and to put themselves
in the place of the refugees.
