Shake/State Affair
During ‘Shake/State Affair’, an international group exhibition that ran in tandem with an exhibition in the Villa Arson, Nice, which included many of the same artists and works, the pleasant part-time receptionists at O.K., one of Austria’s most progressive contemporary art institutions, were instructed to identify foreign visitors and offer them free entry. The action – Jens Haaning’s Foreigners Free (1997–2001) – invited those in the audience to reflect on their citizenship, their ability to prove it and their attitude to positive discrimination.
The twin exhibitions were a culmination of a larger project called Re: Location, spanning three years and involving the co-operation of around ten like-minded art institutions across the EU and Eastern Europe, as well as dozens of individual artists. The first part of this umbrella project involved bilateral exchanges between the various participating bodies. What emerged from these encounters, perhaps rather predictably, were issues relating to nationalism, national identity, borders and territories. It was these that the parallel, jointly mounted, ‘Shake/State Affair’ exhibitions focused on by presenting a range of artistic strategies and responses organized around four main ideas: inclusion/exclusion, national symbols (flags and anthems), stereotypes and representations, and sabotage.
The curators of the exhibition seemed aware of the problem facing public institutions that seek to address socio-political issues head on: they can be undermined by becoming too didactic, by preaching to a minuscule, already converted audience, or just by transporting a sense of moral superiority that simply doesn’t wash outside the squeaky clean contemporary art world bubble. The hard part for politically motivated art is that it has to do something more than the job already done by The Guardian newspaper. What can make an art exhibition addressing the subject of immigrants or asylum seekers more insightful or thought-provoking for a viewer than using public transport, going to an Internet café or a cheap telephone call shop, or just taking a short walk with an open mind in any multicultural neighbourhood in Western Europe? Even if this question can never be adequately answered, ‘Shake’ could still claim some success, in part attributable to the fact that the invited artists have a long-term or genuine investment in the topic, many of them demonstrating a healthy level of irony. And the exhibition was concise enough to be digestible while still encompassing a broad range of approaches.
However well meant, some of the works seemed like one-liners; flags flapping in a light conceptual wind. Candice Breitz’s video installation Alien (Ten Songs from Beyond) (2003), showing new Germans lip-synching German songs, for example, seemed safe and relied on exploiting tired stereotypes. In contrast, two kinds of work stood out: those that were involved in some kind of direct socially engaged or activist practice and, at the other end of the spectrum, those that tackled critically the problem of aesthetic representation in this kind of topical art. In the later category the most visually commanding work in the exhibition was Julian Rosefeldt’s Asylum (2001–2), a high-end production video installation with shades of Bill Viola, Jeff Wall, Darren Almond and Aernout Mik, showing synchronized tableaux vivants of migrant workers in fantasy settings – for example, Eastern European cleaners vacuuming the sand in an artificial desert or newspaper salesmen struggling with their wares in a gigantic wind tunnel.
Perhaps the best works in the exhibition were Hoy Cheong Wong’s RE: Looking (2002–4), an installation that constructed a fake history presenting Austria as a country struggling with a legacy of being a Malaysian colony, and Dennis Adams’ Recovered/10/10 (1993), an edition of books combining photographs from the 1950s of forcibly unveiled Algerian women and ramshackle immigrant neighbourhoods in Marseille. Also quietly powerful was Lisl Ponger’s Phantom fremdes Wien (Phantom Foreign Vienna, 1991–2004), a critical re-presentation of the artist’s own Super 8 films of Viennese migrant communities, which questioned the construction of the exotic subject. Meanwhile the art activists were out on the streets interviewing (Juan Esteban Sandoval’s, Soundomat, 2004), distributing a guide to safe hiking immigration routes into Western Europe (Social Impact’s Border Rescue, 2003) and founding their own alternative states (State of Sabotage/Robert Jelinek’s SOS Gate – Territorial Phantom, 2004). Or, like Haaning, simply getting people in for free.
