7 April – 5 June 2011
Artists : Michael Bielicky and Kamila B. Richter (Czech Republic / Germany), Khaled Hafez (Egypt), Ibro Hasanovic (Bosnia-Herzegovina), IRWIN (Slovenia), Artur Klinov (Belarus), Anila Rubiku (Albania / Italy) + thematic selection from Projected Visions
Curators: Dimitri Konstantinidis and Katerina Koskina
The project Windows upon Oceans presented first in Strasbourg in 2009 is today taken up by the State Museum of Contemporary Art within a unique architecture of the Thessaloniki Concert Hall.
Windows upon Oceans is the result of research work carried out through prospection journeys and meetings with cultural operators along our European coastline. From the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean, via the Black Sea. But not only. We reserved a special place for artists, exhibition curators and art critics who envisage artistic creation as a means of surpassing, of reaching out beyond.
In fact, we took a long look at the question of frontiers – boundary spaces, minority territories, zones of invasion, places of exchange and conflict, the history of migrations. The seas, for us, through their swell and constant ebb and flow, are reminders of the movements of artistic mobility and the agitation in contemporary creation which unceasingly question our world and confront the challenge of innovation.
A frontier, both emblematic and symbolic as it was, the Berlin Wall was doubtless the most relevant illustration of the preoccupations we have just mentioned. 20 years after its fall, can we really affirm that all the mental, cultural, spiritual, social, economic frontiers, have all fallen too? How do the generations of artists who lived at the time of the wall and those who came ‘after’ experience, neglect or deal with these situations?
Beyond any nostalgic commemoration, there is the need to reflect on our society, our daily life, our systems of thought, of government and their capability or incapability of confronting and handling life after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Thessaloniki Concert Hall
In collaboration with the State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki