EMERGENCY TURNED UPSIDE-DOWN
Oliver Ressler
Date
25
29 October 2017
Venue
Nave 16. Centro de residencias
Category
Programme
Centre for Artists in Residence
Emergency Turned Upside-Down confronts the cynical and inhuman discourse that calls refugees presence in Europe “emergency” when that word should be applied to the war, terror and economic strangulation that forced people to move. Emergency Turned Upside-Down is set within the tension that runs through social life right now: on one hand the vast imaginative potential of a borderless world, and on the other, the petty prison of nationality and all the external, internal and social borders it entails.
The film discusses borders performing their everyday function: managing, calibrating and governing global passages of people; dividing and “zoning” into different types of migrants and non-migrants who depend on the trickle of income squeezed from endless work. Borders configure the world, ensuring a supply of people “willing” to do any sort of work if the conditions are coercive enough. What no amount of razor wire promises is that those people will forgive or forget.
Oliver Ressler is an artist and filmmaker who produces installations, projects in public space, and films on issues such as economics, democracy, global warming, forms of resistance and social alternatives. Ressler has had solo exhibitions at Berkeley Art Museum, USA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade; Centro Cultural Conde Duque, Madrid; Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum, Egypt; The Cube Project Space, Taipei and survey solo exhibitions in Wyspa Institute of Art, Gdansk; Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz; Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo – CAAC, Sevilla; SALT Galata, Istanbul; and MNAC – National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest.
An activity from the Transeuropa Festival 2017
Opening of exhibitions: Wednesday, Octobe 25 at 8 pm.
The film discusses borders performing their everyday function: managing, calibrating and governing global passages of people; dividing and “zoning” into different types of migrants and non-migrants who depend on the trickle of income squeezed from endless work. Borders configure the world, ensuring a supply of people “willing” to do any sort of work if the conditions are coercive enough. What no amount of razor wire promises is that those people will forgive or forget.
Oliver Ressler is an artist and filmmaker who produces installations, projects in public space, and films on issues such as economics, democracy, global warming, forms of resistance and social alternatives. Ressler has had solo exhibitions at Berkeley Art Museum, USA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade; Centro Cultural Conde Duque, Madrid; Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum, Egypt; The Cube Project Space, Taipei and survey solo exhibitions in Wyspa Institute of Art, Gdansk; Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz; Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo – CAAC, Sevilla; SALT Galata, Istanbul; and MNAC – National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest.
An activity from the Transeuropa Festival 2017
Opening of exhibitions: Wednesday, Octobe 25 at 8 pm.