I’m a visual artist working in the field of migration, borders and extraterritorial spaces with the intention to contribute towards shaping the current discourses on these political subjects. Video is my preferred medium, but I do a great deal of publishing, public presentations and occasionally initiate collaborative and curatorial projects, all of which I consider part of my artistic practice.
For a number of years, my primary focus has been on gendered systems of world migration, paying special attention to migrant labor from assembly workers in the Free Trade Zone in Mexico or Jordan, to smuggling on the Spanish-Moroccan border and migrant sex workers in the global context. In the video works Black Sea Files (2005) and Sahara Chronicle (2006-2009), I turned from gender to geography as a theoretical tool that should help me understand geopolitical displacements in their complexity. Specific about all these video essays is that they connect a theoretical macro level with the micro perspective on political and cultural practices on the ground. In that sense, the videos are themselves geographic practice in that they engage in a symbolic way of redesigning space. They generate counter-geographies by foregrounding the innovative practices of resistance and survival, rather than a fascination with technologies of control.
My projects are research oriented and carried out in complex forms of collaborations with academics, NGO members, and other practitioners. Black Sea Files, for instance, is part of a collaborative research project on post-socialist geographies which I initiated and produced together with Kunstwerke Berlin, titled B-Zone – Becoming Europe and Beyond. My most recent curatorial and publishing project The Maghreb Connection (Actar) involves artists and scholars from North Africa and Europe who develop together a visual and discursive counter-geography of the trans-Saharan migration system. The exhibition opened in the Townhouse Gallery Cairo, traveled to the Centre d’Art Contemporain Geneva, and later to Abidjan, Dakar and Bamako in West Africa, before becoming a part of other exhibitions such as Port City at the Arnolfini Bristol, Land of Human Rights at the rotor, Graz, and Translocalmotion at the Shanghai Biennial. The Bildmuseet in Sweden made a retrospective of all my video works in 2008 for which the University awarded me an honorary doctorate. The retrospective went on to the Nikolaj Center for Contemporary Art in Copenhagen and to the Helmhaus, Zurich.
I have also worked on addressing the emergence of documentary and essayist practices in the field of art with an international symposium and publication entitled Stuff it – the Video Essay in the Digital Age (Springer 2003) that I organized for the Institute for Theory (ith) in Zurich. My most recent book project Mission Reports – artistic practice in the field is a monograph covering 10 years of my video work, published by Bildmuseet Umea/Arnolfini Bristol with Cornerhouse (2008). Since I am working at the intersection of theory, aesthetic practice and field work, my videos have reached a great diversity of audiences which is reflected in this book.
X-Mission is my most recent video which was released at the Gwangju Biennial 2008. Focusing on the Palestinian refugee case, the video engages with the different discourses that give meaning to the camp through legal, media analytical, urbanist, mythological and sociological narratives. The project brings together some of my main concerns at present: massive statelessness and the artist on mission. It is framed by a special issue on Extra-territoriality in the Middle East which I guest-edited for ArteEast Quarterly. Together with Shuruq Harb I have recently founded ArtTerritoriess a discussion blog for art practices in the Middle East.
… and the economic implications of what I do.
On my return to Switzerland in 1991 after studying and living in New York for many years, I was turned off by the way local artists chiefly strived for finding a gallery to sell their work. I decided to work outside the gallery system and still do today. Thanks to my business background, I found a job as a managing director at the Shedhalle Zurich. The two young curators of this alternative art space were overwhelmed by the amount of work so they asked me to do a curatorial project. I had no idea how to do that, so I simply expanded my art interest in post-colonial criticism into an exhibition, Foreign Services in 1995 and Kültür on Istanbul’s urban politics in 1996.
When I left this job in 1998, I found a teaching position at the art school in Geneva which left me with plenty of spare time to edit my first video Performing the Border. But I got fired shortly after for having taught gender and post-colonial criticism which was considered undesirable. I collected unemployment money for two years during which I produced two more videos. These videos started to sell, particularly in the US, and they got me invited to many panels, lectures, workshops and exhibitions, which generated small irregular incomes. In 2002, I was commissioned to curate an exhibition for the Generali Foundation in Vienna, which was a huge amount of work but earned me hardly any income and the same goes for a symposium and book titled Stuff It on the video essay in the digital Age which I did for the Zurich University of the Arts. I never knew what the next year would bring and my existence was permanently precarious.
The situation changed with the arrival of an invitation from the German Federal Cultural Foundation to generate a substantial research project. Their grant not only financed production and field trips for Black Sea Files, it was enough to subsidize my living expenses. As my first major spatial installation, Black Sea Files also facilitated a certain breakthrough of my investigative video practice in the art world and hence increased the demand. Another major project got funded by Pro Helvetia shortly after. Their grant allowed me to develop Sahara Chronicle which I showed in many art spaces around the world and still generates income for me now. I benefited from the recent upgrading of all art schools in Switzerland to the University level which implied that they would have to conduct research. Since my art practice had always been research oriented, I immediately had suggestions as to what could constitute research in art.
By moving more firmly into the domain of city galleries and art museums, the offers got more comfortably funded and I kept asking for an artist fee. I no longer have to be over joyous to be invited to show my work anywhere, I have to make choices and I’m clearly less willing to work for free. If poorly funded but interesting curators approach me, I just send them a one-channel DVD to screen but don’t invest any time in their project.
Although financial considerations have never impacted on my decision of working on geopolitical issues, I’m juggling between wanting to make my content-oriented videos available to a global public and the need for making a living from it. My upcoming project will fully circulate online but I don’t think this stands in competition with presenting this material as installation in art space. Only galleries could hinder me from doing this which is why I don’t consider working with them.
22.04.2010
