bieman contained mobility

8/8/2019 Bieman Contained Mobility

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Seen on the right screen, which also contains the image of the man, is the story of Anatol Zimmermann, born in a USSR prison under Stalin since his mother had the‘wrong’ (German) nationality. After de-Stalinization he goes to university, earns aPhD , marries, has children, a job. The accident of Chernobyl and later the implosionof the Soviet Union disturb this stability. He becomes a political activist, is persecuted

and goes to jail in his own country and after his release wanders across the continentof Europe in search of a better life. This Odyssey of illegal border crossings, captureby authorities, placement in camps, bureaucratic procedures with an provisional endin Liverpool where his status is pending, is being conveyed to the viewer in the styleof a police report, a factual narrative of a scrolled yellow text on black .( Figure 2)

A second, perceptual and conceptual reading would endeavour to attach meaning toindividual iconographic, formal and technical elements used in Biemann’s video;taking as a point of departure the statement of the artist about

the ongoing struggle between disciplinary mobility and the desire for self-

determination…The shipping container becomes a suitable symbol for thesecontradictory terms as it denotes a quality of confinement and enclosure whileimplying at the same time a systematized world-wide mobility.

6

In economic terms, containerisation is a rationalized, largely automated mode of transportation which by reducing transportation cost enables industries to dislocatetheir facilities further away from their markets into countries with cheaper labour costsand less stringent social standards.

7Containers have been used as a critical

metonym by different artists. One of the first works was Large Triumphal Arch by theBelgian architect Luc Deleu which was shown in Neuchatel, Switzerland in 1983. Inan ironic way Deleu uses containers like huge Lego elements alluding to the Arc deTriomphe in Paris. (Figure 3). In Fish Story Allan Sekula contrasts in one imagethe outer view of containers with the unlimitedness of the sea (Figure 4)

8. By

showing a panoramic view Sekula creates a transcendental romanticising image of seafaring as opposed to the grim working conditions on the boat itself.

9In

Contained mobility the container alludes to the free flow of goods if read together with the image of oil stock facilities in the harbour on the second screen. The viewer can also look into the inside which becomes a fictional “home” for somebody on themove. Read together with the narrative scrolled onto the image, the container seemsto be an unreal, ironic place of domesticity complete with bed, cooking facility, deskand bucket serving as a toilet.

10The artist explains that

Anatol comes to signify the itinerant body, probing protocols of access in justabout every country in Europe. He moves through non–civil places, waits for

6 Contained mobility in www.geobodies.org

7Allan Sekula , Fish story ,Witte de With, Centrum voor Hedendaagse Kunst, Rotterdam 1995, p.49.

Dislocation to countries with cheaper labour becomes not only an issue of exploitation of cheap labour on the new production site but also one of destruction of jobs in the original place of production.8 ibid. p.57

9 Steve Edwards:’ Photography out of Conceptual Art’ in Gill Perry and Paul Wood (eds ) Themes in

Contemporary Art, Yale University Press, London 2004, p.169 10

The artist refers to her research for the work .She discovered a news story about an illegalpassenger who used a container to be shipped to Canada but got intercepted by the police. LiverpoolBiennial, International 04, exhibition catalogue ,Liverpool ,2004, p.28



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status in off-social spaces, and lives in a condition of permanent non-belonging.

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The spectator’s gaze into the inside of the container, perceived through asurveillance camera, evokes a collapse of the borders between public and private

life. (Figure 5). Surveillance technology leads to a curtailing of civil liberties in thename of security and is part of what Deleuze calls a ‘control society.’ Unlikedisciplinary societies whose characteristic modus operandi is the organisation of major sites of confinement like family, school, workplace, prisons, hospital or theinternment camps, the control society’s key mode of operation are mobility on theone side and access control on the other hand.12 The code replaces the key. Thelogic of access has a long tradition in border controls and immigration rules and andin legislation governing citizenship. The Spanish artist Santiago Sierra conceived theSpanish Pavilion at the last Biennial in Venice in such a way that it was onlyaccessible to visitors with a Spanish Passport. As he explained in an Interview withKunstforum:

Ich denke, die meisten, die zur Biennale kommen haben nie am eigenen Leibeverspuert, politisch ausgeschlossen zu sein. Ich wollte mit dem SpanischenPavillion kein Bild schaffen, sondern eine Erfahrung.

13

However control is not absolute for the very reasons of the system itself since it hasblind spots. They become manifest to the viewer when Anatol disappears from thescreen as a result of the angle at which the picture is taken. Thus blind spots becomea metaphor for the system’s loopholes which Anatol tries to exploit.

14.On the other

hand, surveillance cameras may –beyond the invasion on privacy - also constitute an“ontological guarantee of existence” (Zizek) which implies that ‘ I exist only insofar as I am looked at’.

15While Zizek relates this mainly to the entertainment industry and

to aspects of voyeurism it becomes an essential part of the work of artists and journalists. It is not clear whether Anatol has installed the camera himself or whether he is being observed without knowing –but without the camera we would not knowabout him.Another pictorial element of Contained Mobility are digital landscapes and at onemoment Anatol takes up a Yoga position and his figure dissolves in the air. He mightresort to meditation in order to escape the confinement and precariousness of hissituation. Perceiving things in a different, unreal way could also be an expression of afeeling of the stressful relationship and problematic sense of the self in relation toplaces.

16This interpretation would have the viewer perceive the mental state of the

11 www.geobodies and e-mail to the author

12 Gilles Deleuze: Postscript on Control Societies , Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne, and Peter Weibel

(eds) Ctrl [space] : rhetorics of surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother , Karlsruhe,Germany : ZKMeditors, Center for Art and Media , MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 2002 pp.317-32113

‘I believe that most visitors of the Venice Biennial never have had the personal experience of beingexcluded for political reasons. With the Spanish pavilion I did not want to create an image but anexperience’. In Doris von Drathen: Gespraech mit Santiago Sierra in Kunstforum International, Volume 166, August-October 2003 pp.238-23914

Christian Katti: Systematically Observing Surveillance ’in Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne, andPeter Weibel (editors) Ctrl [space] : rhetorics of surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother , Karlsruhe,Germany : ZKMeditors, Center for Art and Media ; MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 2002 p.5315

Slavoj Zizek: Big Brother, or, the, Triumph of the Gaze over the Eye in ibid.p.22516

In The House (2002) Eija-Liisa Ahtila shows the complete breakdown of perceptive logic by makinga woman fly through the house. This work is based on conversations with women who have overcomepsychosis. Dokumenta 11, exhibition short guide p.12



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stressful condition of a human being alone and uprooted. Rather than reading thecreation of irreality of the landscape through digital imaging as a personal,psychoanalytical experience I would argue that the artist employs a distancingstrategy in the Brechtian sense of alienation. 17 This reading would also be coherentwith the use of the textual narrative which replaces the storyteller in a play thus

creating another element of distancing .

Single elements of pictorial form, like adjacent screens, the iconography of thecontainer, the technique of the surveillance camera and the digital landscape as wellas the textual narrative are woven together by means of a “video essay”. In the book‘Stuff it, the video essay in a digital world’ Biemann explains the purpose of the videoessay as a “a distinctive aesthetic strategy” with an aim to advance artistic and criticaldiscourse in the digital age.

18She incorporates some elements of Adorno’s thinking

into the more formal aspects of her work.19 According to Adorno luck and play areessential elements of the essay and its objectivity is based on the experience of theindividual.

20Similarly, Biemann playfully shifts the screens from left to right and back

and engages in the story of one single person in order to make a far-reachingcritique of the actual system of immigration into Europe.

…..der Gedanke schreitet nicht einsinnig fort, sondern die Momenteverflechten sich teppichhaft. Von der Dichte dieser Verflechtung haengt dieFruchtbarkeit von Gedanken ab.

21

In my reading of these poetic words, Adorno refers not only to the formal elements of the essay but also to the potential of creating and conveying to the reader/viewer multi-layered thinking in language and imaging as a reaction against a simple, one-dimensional, logical world.

22The video essay allows to visualize the complexity of

transitional situations and is at the same time discourse for critique. By applying thevery same means control society uses, namely the surveillance camera, the artistcriticises the system. While the subject matter is the almost desperate survivalstrategy of an individual against dominant power structures embodied in border and

17 In Brechtian theatre there are often elements (like a chorus, a storyteller) which intend to distance

the viewer (‘Verfremdungseffekt’/alienation).Walter Benjamin quotes Brecht :’Something must in factbe built up, something artificial posed’; in ‘A small history of photography’ in One Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter,Verso, London 1979 p.255 18 Ursula Biemann (editor) Stuff it, the video essay in the digital age, Voldemeer Zurich, Springer,

Vienna, 2003 p.8 19 However, I would argue that the thrust of Adorno’s defence of the essay is a critique against the

established “Germanic “ system of thinking with an impermeable border between the arts on the onehand and science on the other and the latter’s claim for absolute truth and completeness. In thiscontext the essay might be understood as a critical tool against a system.20‘The measure of such objectivity is that the verification of assertion is not through repeated testing

but rather individual human experience, maintained through hope and disillusionment’. Adorno: Der Essay als Form in ‘Noten zur Literatur ’ , Suhrkamp,Frankfurt 1974, translated in Rolf Tiedemann(editor) Notes to Literature, Columbia University Press, New York 1991 p.8

21‘A thought does not step forward in one sense, but moments interweave like a carpet. The fertility of

thoughts depends on the density of such weaving.’ Adorno: Der Essay als Form in ‘Noten zur Literatur ’Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 1974,p 21; my own translation22

Adorno had to resign himself to the fact that society was one dimensional. Eike Gebhardt in AndrewArato and Eike Gebhardt (editors), The Essential Frankfurt School Reader , Continuum, NewYork,2002 ,p.220



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immigration controls the formal artistic strategy remains distant yet dense. Suchdensity is achieved by using techniques of new digital imaging and editing whichallow artists to stack video and audio tracks on top of one another, with multipleimages, running text and a complex sound mix competing for the attention of theaudience. However, as I could observe at the Liverpool Biennial, even the most

compressed videos do not manage to capture the attention of the viewer for longer than two or three minutes, an attention span much shorter than the twenty-oneminutes’ duration of the artwork.

Making and viewing art can become a way of thinking that is non-linear and not self-reflective but a communicative action. Biemann’s visual strategy, a broader view of her other work, the theory which has influenced her and a reading of her owntheoretical writing bring me as a viewer with my own personal experience to another reading of Contained mobility in a far broader context. 23Such an interpretation wouldlink the objective historic conditions of the new Europe (after the implosion of theSoviet Union, the emergence of a number of new states

and the creation of new

borders24 while some borders within the European Union disappeared) to theconsequences of Diaspora and migration on the individual.(Figure 6)Ethnic migration, and political refugees already accompanied the fall of the OttomanEmpire, the emergence of the Soviet Union after the fall of the Tsarist empire andthe dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Peace treaties changed borders andposited at best minority rights for residents in ‘new’ homelands. In countries likeCzechoslovakia and Rumania up to 30% of the population were constituted byminorities.

25The rise of Nazism brought the Holocaust , a wave of emigration of

intellectuals, members of other political orientations, whose options of where to gobecame more and more limited as the Germans advanced, with many of themending in concentration camps. The Germans themselves organised ’ Umsiedlungen’and brought foreign workers to their territory. And while people fled first from theGerman troops, at the end of the war they fled from the Red Army . A further wave of political refugees accompanied the installation of Communist regimes in EasternEurope , the uprising in Hungary 1956 and the end of the Prague spring in 1968, toname just a few key events. More recently the dissolution of Yugoslavia and theensuing war on the Balkan caused streams of ethnic migration (and death campsagain) while the implosion of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Eastern bloccontributed to a further wave of economic refugees . In brief, European History of theTwentieth Century history is marked by an almost continuous stream of refugees. It isamazing that in spite of this history and streams of ‘Gastarbeiter’ (Foreign workers

who took up low paid jobs nationals would refuse since the 1970s) the politicaldebate in German speaking countries, particularly in Biemann’s native Switzerlandand in Austria still focuses on foreigners as opposed to ‘Einheimische’. 26 In my owncountry, Austria, the housing of asylum seekers with a status pending or in other words the location of temporary camps in such a way that they don’t ‘disturb’ the localpopulation is one of the hottest issues of local politics. Recently proposed legislationwould curtail further refugees’ rights of appeal in asylum procedures with a view to

23 My father and my grandparents were refugees.

24 on the territory of the former Soviet Union , the former Yugoslavia and the former CSSR

25 Today the Baltic republics of Latvia and Estonia comprise a Russian minority in the order of 30 % of

their population. Even if they were born on Latvia or Estonia they have no passport nor other citizen’srights unless they pass a language examination .26

literally those who have a home



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appease the ultra right whose political platform is one of unrestricted and outrightxenophobia and who nevertheless participate in government

27.

Biemann‘s whole work as an artist, a curator and a theorist seeks to subvert modelsof polarized thinking without resorting to victimization. Anatol is by no means acolonized or a disadvantaged member of the Lumpenproletariat but a highly

educated, smartly dressed human being using technology cunningly to find loopholesin the system of Schengenland.

In earlier work, Biemann has mainly dealt with the situation of women, in for instancePerforming the Border where she addresses the situation of the female work force inassembly plants located in ‘free zones’ on the post NAFTA border between the USand Mexico.

28One aspect of this work is the examination of women’s roles as the

main breadwinner of the family and how this influences traditional family and gender roles. Gender roles are rewritten with women as consumers in bars catering tofemale desires and as objects of desire by earning extra money through prostitution.

As to the situation in her own country Biemann, as art theorist29 comes to theconclusion…..’dass der sture Fokus auf Rasse und Differenz den komplexen kulturellen undsozialen Bedingungen der heutigen Diaspora Gesellschaft nicht gerecht werden. Er reproduziert nur die binaeren Oppositionen (wir/sie), die schon dem kolonialenKonzept zugrunde liegen’

30.

Biemann curated the exhibition Geography and the Politics of Mobility in Vienna in2003. The main idea was to look no longer at ‘dislocated subjectivities due to globalmigration or the participation in the virtual world but rather at the way places arebeing constructed through them’. Biemann also underlines that actually we witness ‘adiscursive shift from the diasporic identity as a subject with a history to a geographicdiscourse.

31

In cultural theory “otherness” is socially constructed, firstly and foremost by a traditionof thought, imagery and vocabulary of a dominant power. In the French and Englishcontext it is seen as the relation between the colonizer and the colonized, informedby the work of Edward Said, among many others32. Already in the Sixties the Frenchsociologist Pierre Bourdieu conveyed the social and economic changes caused bythe war in Algeria through text and photography. Today the work of Bourdieu isregarded as an important testimony relevant in a time where economic logic of

27 I should mention that there are active counter movements, in particular against the forced

repatriation of illegal (mostly non-European )immigrants. About the action group ‘kein Mensch istillegal/No one is illegal’ see Florian Schneider :’New rules for new actonomy’ in Democracy Unrealized Platform 1 of Dokumenta 11, Hatje Cantz Ostfildern-Ruit, 2002 p.179-193 and www.makeworlds.org28

Multinational corporations, ‘maquiladoras’ are exempt of respecting labour laws, from paying socialsecurity and certain taxes and custom.29

Biemann teaches at the Institute for Theory of Art and Design in Zurich30

Text by Ursula Biemann in Been there and back to nowhere, Wenn sich Kunst und Migrationverschwestern .’ Focussing on race and difference does not reflect adequately the complex social andcultural conditions of ‘Diaspora societies’.Race and difference reflect binary oppositions ( we/the other)which are at the basis of a colonial understanding’ see www.geobodies.org.books.31 Ursula Biemann (editor) Geography and the Politics of Mobility , exhibition catalogue,

Generali Foundation ,Vienna ,Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter Koenig, Koeln 2003 pp.14-20

32Edward W.Said: Orientalism, Penguin Books,2004



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globalisation requests a mobile and flexible workforce33.Bourdieu argues that theresettlement politics of the colonizers caused a major change in attitude from aperson who before had strong ties with the community as an “organic and spiritual“unit. He also notes that the cultural decay brought about by the encounter of civilizations and by colonization is being Intensified by the resettlement.” Life in a

new environment brings a break of tradition which is definite since there is noperspective of return

34. Bourdieu also laments that

Die kollektive Melancholie ist Ausdruck von Verwirrung, Angst und Zeichenfuer das Schwinden der frueheren Solidaritaeten. Das materielle Elend trifftden Einzelnen in seinem Innersten, weil es den Zusammenbruch desWertesystems beschleunigt, das die Identifikation des Individuums mit der ganzen Gruppe bedingte und ihn vor der Entdeckung seiner Einsamkeitschuetzte.’35

However, Bourdieu ‘s account of uprootedness, while written and illustrated with

deep compassion, remains the nostalgic account of an outsider.36 In postcolonial theory Homi Bhabha looks at forms of hybridity and sees theboundary as a place from which a liminal negotiation of cultural identity acrossdifference of race, class, gender and cultural traditions takes place. Communities andpolitical diaspora have articulated themselves as cultural differences produced in in-between spaces. According to this theory new strategies of selfhood initiate newsigns of identity. 37 Visual examples of this negotiation of liminal spaces might bethe work of Chris Ofili and Yinka Shonibare, both of Nigerian origin and living inLondon. However, I believe that such liminal spaces require a certain stability for instance a settling down in a new environment.

38Hence they do not account for the

situation of the migrant on the move facing the condition of acute uprootedness.

The situation of the actual European refugee is distinct in that a colonized statuscoming close to the descriptions of Frantz Fanon would at worst be the historicalcondition of insurgent Greek under the Ottoman Empire.

39However, the’ pure

human in itself’ finds even today no autonomous space in the political order of the

33Franz Schultheis in the introduction to Pierre Bourdieu : In Algerien Zeugnisse der Entwurzelung ,

Camera Austria, Graz 2003 p.16 34

ibid. p. 6635

‘Collective melancholia is caused by confusion, anxiety and signs of vanishing former solidarities.

Material misery hits the individual in his innermost self since it accelerates the collapse of the valuesystem, which before had enabled identification of the individual with the group and had protected himfrom the discovery of his loneliness’. Pierre Bourdieu : In Algerien Zeugnisse der Entwurzelung ,Camera Austria, Graz 2003 p.180, translation my own.36 One could argue that Bourdieu takes an ‘etic’ position which looks at non-western culture from the

perspective of his own culture. The differentiation into “etic” and “emic”attitude is made by Rex Butler in the context of Australian aboriginal art. While emic would be a look from the point of view of tribalparticipants; etic acknowledges that we can only look at the culture of the other through our own view.See Rex Butler : ‘ Emily Kame Kngwarreye and the undestructible Space of Justice’ in Gaiger/Wood Art of the Twentieth century p.306.’ Emic’ accounts of uprootedness of immigrans were made byBourdieu’s friend and collaborator Abdelmalek Sayad in The suffering of the immigrant , Polity Press,Cambridge 200437

Homi Bhabha ,The location of culture , Routledge , London 1994 38

The need for re-grounding and home-building has been researched from a feminist point of view inAhmed /Castaneda et al.( eds) Uprootings and Regroundings, Berg, New York 2003 39

I exclude the Nazi time



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nation state or in the context of the European Union40. The concept of so called‘Universal’ Human rights is linked to citizenship or at least to some bond with a nationstate like permanent residency and is often further limited by the principle of noninterference into internal affairs.Rights only exist within the organisation of the state

.. While on the one hand a

growing number of refugees never become citizens of the state in which they reside,on the other hand citizens of advanced industrial states no longer participate inelections and become de facto permanent residents (albeit with all the rights and theprotection of citizens) and the gap between the citizen and the state become larger and larger. Also we have experienced a complete dismantling of the welfare statetogether with a renewed emphasis on its policing functions. To conclude: so calleduniversal rights are limited to citizens and one can see certain tendencies of thenation state dissolving as a result of its relationship to people living on its territoryand as a result of its diminishing functions in the social order. These developmentsare accompanied in many European countries by a rise of the right, to a large extentbut not exclusively by the expression of xenophobic reaction whose field of vision is

informed through processes of negative differentiation with propaganda aiming at theotherness of the immigrant population.In this situation some thinkers (such as Irit Rogoff,) tend toward a presentation of thecontradictory nature of the concept of cultural identity as such which in someinstances might dissolve altogether ‘since they are socially constructed andperformative rather than essentially attributed and therefore unstable entities

41’.Trinh

Minh ha underlines that dominant culture demands that difference be rememberedand asserted in order to deal with it as fragments ( when several cultures areinvolved)42. Biemann , whose thinking is influenced by Rogoff and Trinh Minh ha,notes that we move away from conceptual and organisational categories like classand gender towards an awareness of subject positions which include generation,institutional location and geopolitical locale43 Where the artist’s strategy is most successful is in conveying the message thatpeople can no longer be nailed down by a definite status, and that the concept of “otherness” when linked to stereotyping, can become extremely problematic. In adifferent context the American artist Adrian Piper suggested that stereotyping , linkedto abstract thinking should be replaced by ‘concrete particularity’.44 Similarly,Eagleton refers to Marx and the latter’s political ethic regarding sensuous particularityas a form of release from the prison house of abstraction.45

Contained Mobility represents a discursive shift from the artist’s previous work . In

Performing the border Biemann’s main preoccupation was the condition of women asa specific group in a specific situation, namely the female workforce in the assemblyplants on the Mexican-US border. Contained Mobility confronts the viewer with thefate of one individual in order to reveal a political problem. One could argue that

40 Giorgio Agamben, Means without Ends, notes on politics, University of Minnesota

Press,Minneapolis 2000 p.1941

Irit Rogoff: ‘Studying Visual Culture’ in Mirzoeff, Visual Culture Reader ,Routledge ,London,2004,p.3242

Trinh, T. Minh-Ha , Woman, native, other : writing postcoloniality and feminism , Indiana UniversityPress, Bloomington 1989 p.9043 Ursula Biemann in an e-mail to the author 44

Performance: Strategy and Process, a solo exhibition by Adrian Piper, Talk and Screening,November 6 ,2004 at Artsadmin,London45

Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism, Blackwell,Oxford 1997 p.118



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Contained mobility is not only the story of the ‘universal refugee’ but also of onesingle man’s struggle against anonymous controlling powers. This work is influencedby the the writings of Giorgio Agamben.

46Referring to the Roman period when law

had the power to separate citizens from naked life 47Agamben argues that whilenaked life (or the pure human) is excluded from citizenship and exercising other

rights, political power nevertheless exercises control over it.That there is no autonomous space in the political order of the nation-

state for something like the pure human in itself is evident at the very leastfrom the fact that, even in the best of cases, the status of refugee has alwaysbeen considered a temporary condition that ought to lead either tonaturalization or to repatriation. A stable statute for the human in itself isinconceivable in the law of the nation -state.

48

Biemann translates this temporary condition by explicitly and textually referring to a‘container world which can only tolerate a condition of not-belonging and juridical non – existence’ .

49Another reference to the legal situation is made in the concluding

phrase, ‘Everything new is born illegal’.

As mentioned in the first part of the essay, the video as a whole appears distant fromthe viewer. However, there is one moment when the spectator comes closer to theman on the screen. That is when Anatol speaks on the phone in a mixture of Germanand Russian and the sound of his voice is accompanied by a close-up of his body. Acertain distance between the artwork and the viewer remains, since the latter doesnot understand the conversation and hence does not feel empathy. However,despite this emotional disengagement, the viewer is confronted intellectually with theidea of a common or universal human nature.

50

In this way the artwork shifts from the specific issue of immigration to a moreuniversal discourse about rights of non - citizens and further to the concept of a‘shared human nature’ which, according to Eagleton, supersedes the anti-universalism of Postmodernism.51 Eagleton does not claim originality but refers toMarx’s concept of a common or universal human nature, nor does he negatepostmodernism as such but seeks alternatives with a view of realizing a vision of a just society.52 I would go further and argue that presently we are exposed to viewingsuch a degree of inhumanity and violence on TV and PC screens - sometimescaptured by amateur videos and thus becoming even more credible as ‘reality’,

46 e-mail by Ursula Biemann to the author

47 ‘naked life’ is the literal translation of ‘nuda vita’ which Agamben already uses in Homo Sacer ,

footnote to the preface of Giorgio Agamben, Means without Ends, notes on politics, University of Minnesota Press,Minneapolis 2000 p.142. In his writings Agamben also equals ‘naked life’ with‘human being’ ibid.p.2048 Giorgio Agamben, Means without Ends, notes on politics, University of Minnesota

Press,Minneapolis 2000 p.2049

Prologue to Contained Mobility , the text spoken by the artist is reprinted in Liverpool Biennial ,International 04, exhibition catalogue Liverpool , 2004 p.2550

Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism, Blackwell,Oxford 1997 p.116f 51

‘Marx strongly believed in a common or universal human nature, but he considered individuation to

be an integral part of it.’ In Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism, Blackwell,Oxford 1997p.11652 ibid. preface p.9



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sometimes deliberately staged to create terror - that the depthlessness of postmodernist culture and the image of the simulacrum seem no longer tenable.

53

As Okwui Enwezor points out ‘postcoloniality embodies the spectacular mediationand representation of nearness as the dominant mode of understanding the present

condition of globalization”54

. From such nearness of distant places and in the face of the actual political situation arises in my opinion the (ethical) need that the artistseeks to develop what I would call ‘strategies of encounter’ instead of engaging inself-seeking and self-expression.Juergen Habermas presents a theory of communicative action based on a (critical)continuation of the discourse of modernity. 55 He criticizes Foucault’s concept of thesubject-centred reason and pleads instead for inter-subjective understanding andreciprocal recognition. Human beings are part of a life world, as’ products of thetradition in which they stand, the socializing groups to which they belong and thesocializing processes in which they grow up’.

56The strength of this theory lies in the

idea of an interpersonal relationship within which ‘ego relates to himself as a

participant in an interaction from the perspective of the other’.57 Its weakness is that itis based on the assumptions that man is a rational being and that social structuresare intact.

Ursula Biemann’s work is successful in making the viewer conscious of the situationof the refugee not just as a ‘pure human being’ in the sense of Agamben but also asan individual who can no longer be ‘nailed down’ by a definite status. She leavesbinary oppositions (we/the other) behind and engages in a multilayered visualstrategy to open to the spectator the potential of a broad reading of her work in thecontext of today’s world. She considers herself mainly as a mediator between theinside and outside of the cultural context.

58Her work is by no means self -reflective

but she actively develops communicative strategies as an artist, as a curator and asa theorist.

53 ‘depthlessness’ and ‘simulacrum’ are terms used by Frederic Jameson to characterise some traitsof postmodernist culture .see Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Verso NewYork, 1991 p.654 Okwui Enwezor, ‘The Black Box’ in Documenta 11, Exhibition Catalogue, Hatje Cantz,Ostfildern- Ruit 2002,p.4455 Thomas McCarthy :Introduction to Jürgen Habermas, The philosophical discourse of modernity ,Blackwell , Oxford 1987,p.756 Jürgen Habermas,The philosophical discourse of modernity , Blackwell , Oxford 1987 p.299

57

ibid. p.297 58 Ursula Biemann: ‘Been there and back to nowhere, wenn sich Kunst und Migration verschwestern’

in www.geobodies.org



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Ahmed /Castaneda et al.( editors) Uprootings and Regroundings, Berg, New York2003

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Kingsley Shorter,Verso, London 1979

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Ursula Biemann (editor) Geography and the Politics of Mobility , exhibition catalogue,Generali Foundation ,Vienna ,Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter Koenig, Koeln 2003

Pierre Bourdieu : In Algerien Zeugnisse der Entwurzelung , Camera Austria, Graz2003

Rex Butler, ‘Emily Kame Kngwarreye and the Undestructible Space of Justice’ inJason Gaiger and Paul Wood (editors) Art of the Twentieth Century , Yale UniversityPress, New Haven 2003

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Frantz Fanon, The wretched of the Earth, translated by ConstanceFarrington, Evergreen , 1991

Francis Fukuyama, Our posthuman future,Profile Books ,London, 2002

Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (editors) Art in theory, 1900-2000 , an anthology of changing ideas, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford 2003

Jürgen Habermas,The philosophical discourse of modernity , Blackwell , Oxford 1987

Stuart Hall ‘New Ethnicities’, in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen eds, Stuart Hall:Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, Routledge, London, 1996

David Harvey The condition of postmodernity : an enquiry into the origins of cultural change Blackwell , Oxford 1989

Frederic Jameson Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,VersoNew York, 1991

Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani (editors), Remaking history , Bay Press ,Seattle1989

Miwon Kwon , One place after another : site-specific art and locational identity , MITPress, Cambridge, Mass 2002

Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne, and Peter Weibel (editors) Ctrl [space] : rhetorics of surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother , Karlsruhe, Germany : ZKMeditors, Center for Art and Media ; MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 2002

Liverpool Biannial , International 04, exhibition catalogue Liverpool ,2004

Nicholas Mirzoeff (editor) The visual culture reader Routledge, London 1998

Lev Manovich ,The language of new media , MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass 2001

Gill Perry and Paul Wood (eds ) Themes in Contemporary Art, Yale University Press,

London 2004

Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma, geography’s visual culture, Routledge, London 2000

Edward W.Said: Orientalism, Penguin Books,2003

Abdelmayek Sayad: The suffering of the immigrant , Polity Press, Cambridge 2004

Allan Sekula , Fish story , Witte de With, Centrum voor HedendaagseKunst, Rotterdam ,1995

Trinh, T. Minh-Ha , Woman, native, other : writing postcoloniality and feminism ,Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1989



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Doris von Drathen: Gespraech mit Santiago Sierra in Kunstforum International, Volume 166, August-October 2003

Thomas Wulffen, ‘Liverpool Bienniale’ in Kunstforum International , Volume 173,

November- December 2004

Slavoj Zizek, ‘Multiculturalism ,Or,the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism’, inNew Left Review , 225,September-October 1997 ,pp.28-51

Websiteswww.geobodies.org/art/artprojects/mobility.html

www.makeworlds.org

Other sources:

Slavoj Zizek ‘The reality of the virtual.’ Video presentation at ICA, October 28, 2004

Performance: Strategy and Process, a solo exhibition by Adrian Piper, Talk andScreening, at Artsadmin, London, November 6 , 2004



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List of Illustrations

Fig.1 Ursula Biemann:Contained Mobility ,synchronized double screen video

projection. Video still

Fig.2. Ursula Biemann:Contained Mobility ,synchronized double screen videoprojection. Video still of one screen

Fig 3. Luc Deleu: Large Triumphal Arch exhibited in Neuchatel, Switzerland 1983

Fig 4. Allan Sekula: Panorama-Mid Atlantic 1993 from Fish Story

Fig 5. Ursula Biemann:Contained Mobility ,synchronized double screen videoprojection. Video still of one screen

Fig 6. Map of Europe (2004)



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bieman contained mobility

Documents