18 May – 20 Jun 2002
Dave Allen (Glasgow), Michelle Alperin (Los Angeles), Nairy Baghramian (Isfahan), Basserode (Nice), Dominic Eichler (Ballarat) und Ninon Liotet (Chaumont), Omer Fast (Jerusalem), Sofia Hultén (Stockholm), Alisa Anh Kottmair (Baltimore), Joep van Liefland (Utrecht), Liu Anping (Sanyan), Yvette Mattern (San Juan), Hester Oerlemans (Schijndel), Ines Pais (Lissabon), Christine Rebet (Lyon), Anselm Reyle, Egill Sæbjörnsson (Reykjavik), Özcan Sen (Berlin), Chiharu Shiota (Osaka), Kei Takemura (Tokyo), Alexandra Trencséni (Würzburg), Geerten Verheus (Amsterdam), Yin Xiuzhen (Peking), Rommelo Yu (Caloocan City), Dolores Zinny & Juan Maidagan (Rosario)
Here and Now invites artists who live now here in Berlin. As a snapshot of the locality „Berlin”, it asks the question how the city is capable of absorbing and producing difference. The necessity to react to the new situation dominates the works of the artists, that settle down in Berlin for a while. It is not the cultural idiosyncracies that are an issue here, but the demanding processes of location and re-location. The newcomers enact consciously, what the old-establishment has always unconsciously performed – blending in and displacement are universal subjects. The national parameters are dropped without dictating an international style. So the increasing mobility doesn’t necessarily have to lead to the homogenization of culture. For Appadurai, one of the central figures in the debate about cultural difference, the diasporic cultural sphere (in his book „Modernity at Large”) is the motor of present and future culture production. Cultural identity is not thought of as substance, but is being produced with the help of „imagination” in the search for membership, in the formation of group identity. Cultural identity „happens” as a process, most apparent in the moment of orientation in a new environment. A city can work then, when the intellectual and institutional infrastructure is supportive in this search; the task of a metropolis like Berlin could be, to support this without homogenizing. Are the networks – the official and inofficial – open enough to allow diversity and enable the „translation of cultures”?
Here and Now is a snapshot – an encounter of young artists, who practice this translation in different media. The formal preconditions and the structural consequences of these translations are thereby central to their work; so they deal with dramatization, with the „logics of starting-point”, with mobile networks, with the language of opposition, the staging of non-places, with wanting to disappear and the desire to be on the road and part of the „travel culture”.
With Here and Now BüroFriedrich opens its new space. Together with the gallerists of the Jannowitzbrücke there will be an opening with an open end with drinks, food and music. Sponsored by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science.