Berlin: spring news!

Very pleased to announce that the project Guests has received support from the Arts Council England for the final phase of the work. More updates soon! Viele Grüsse aus Berlin!

'Guests' installation and collective reading at the group exhibition Exposures/Where Everything is Yet to Happen, Banja Luka, Nov 2010

Installation 'Guests/Gosti' together with a collective reading/performance titled 'Guesture/Gostikulacija', took place as part of a group exhibition Exposures, the second chapter of the long-term, collaborative project Where Everything Is Yet to Happen. The entire project was curated by Antonia Majaca and Ivana Bago, curators of Miroslav Kraljevic gallery in Zagreb, and took place in Banja Luka, Mostar and Sarajevo in the form of an exhibition, a set of seminars, workshops, and new productions. For further information about the project Where Everything is Yet to Happen (WEIYTH) and SpaPort Biennial 2009/10, please click here.

The exhibition in Banja Luka, was installed within ex-offices of a telecommunications factory 'Cajavec', which was unfortunately facing an end to its nearly 40 years of production. My late uncle Jovo worked for Cajavec as an engineer his whole working life, so it was particularly sad seeing this company, which was a major employer during socialist Yugoslavia, crumble. At the same time, (and there is always something uncomfortable in admitting the beauty of such places) dusty corridors and musty offices with the 70's furniture certainly provided a poignant setting for the work.

During the exhibition I staged a collective reading of the material from the installation/archive, within the installation space, and being with a small group of people, created a sense of intimacy in which personal stories could be re-performed. Each person from the audience took turn in reading sections of a text - excerpts from interviews with 'guestworkers' - adding their own voice to it.

One of the women I met at the women's club in the Serbian centre, in Berlin, Zora, was on holiday in Banja Luka at the time, came for the talk, and spoke about her own experience of moving to Germany as a Gastarbeiter, and living and working there now for forty years. It was quite amazing to have her there, and a bit of a surprise - even though I told Zora about the exhibition when I was in Berlin, I didn't know that she will come to the talk. Having her there as part of the event, enabled a spontaneous dialogue and cross-generational exchange that in my experience, very rarely happens. It has left me wondering if such an event could be more directed, and even staged, and if so, how to create such atmosphere in which an exchange of experience and dialogue could take place... ?

...

While going through the folders that were left in the cupboards (in the space where I was setting up my work), I discovered small photographs that showed chemical reactions in the machines that were used in the Cajevac factory. The catalogue was in German, probably the machines used for producing televisions sets in Cajevac factory were the same as those that 'guestworker' women used in factories in Berlin. I was struck by how beautiful these images are, very abstract in shapes, and colour, almost like Malevich paintings and yet they were purely chemical tests - they revive and redraw links between photography, chemistry, machinery and the human, affective, and transcendent space, something I always thought was intruiging in photography...

...

While the exhibition was on, Angela Merkel gave her troubling speech about the failure of multiculturalism, specifically refering to this generation of guest workers saying: "At the start of the 60s we invited the guest-workers to Germany. We kidded ourselves for a while that they wouldn't stay, that one day they'd go home. That isn't what happened. And of course the tendency was to say: let's be 'multikulti' and live next to each other and enjoy being together, [but] this concept has failed, failed utterly."

Hearing her speech, and wondering if she suffered from a stroke of amnesia, highlighted to me even more how important it is that the personal stories of this generation of migrants do enter the public domain, to undermine this xenophobic and ultimately reductive reading of history that is taking hold not only in Germany, but in the UK, and across Europe. Though of course questions of critical context to the images and texts do remain...

And...was pleased to see this insightful article by Gary Younge on German's struggles with race: Germans still struggling to resolve issues of race

...

THE CATALOGUE of the show will be published shortly, please email me if you would like a copy info[at]margaretakern[dot]com

TO SEE IMAGES OF INSTALLATION FROM OTHER EXHIBITIONS in 2011, PLEASE CLICK ON THE LINKS BELOW:

- BERLIN

- BUDAPEST

- BUCHAREST (coming soon! including a dialogue with photographer and writer Anthony Luvera...)

Guests - Installation at the Museum of Contemporary Arts, Budapest

Over the Counter: The Phenomena of Post-socialist Economy in Contemporary Art
18 June 2010 - 19 September 2010
Curators: Eszter Lázár and Zsolt Petrányi
Műcsarnok/Kunsthalle, Budapest

The exhibition called Over the Counter has been inspired by the economic illusions, utopias, creativity and frustration that Central Europe has been home to recently, and is made relevant by the global economic crisis which began in 2008, and which can be looked upon as a negative critique of the process of adopting the capitalist order. Continue reading here.

The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue which was launched during the conference with the same title, further information can be found here.

Artists: Matei Bejenaru, Bukta Imre, Mircea Cantor, Olga Chernysheva, Anetta Chisa, & Lucia Tkácová, Erhardt Miklós, Andreas Fogarasi, Kristina Inciuraité, Interorient, Keserue Zsolt, Margareta Kern, Johanna Kandl, Yuri Leiderman, Kristina Leko, Anna Molska, Deimantas Narkevicius, Nemes Csaba, Lucia Nimcova, Uriel Orlow, Dan Perjovschi, REINIGUNGSGESELLSCHAFT, R.E.P., Katerina Sedá, Société Réaliste, Mladen Stilinovic, Lukasz Skapski, Kamen Stojanov, Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor, Clemens von Wedemeyer.

"Guests" installation at Journeys with No Return exhibition, Kurt-Kurt Gallery, Berlin, June 2010

photographs by Marcus Kern.

Journeys with No Return
Kurt-Kurt Gallery, BERLIN
11 – 20 JUNE 2010
Exhibition Preview: Fri 11 June, 2010, 7pm
Talk 2-3pm Sat 12th June: Curators Alice Sharp and Peter Cross, with the exhibition artists Melanie Manchot and Margareta Kern.
Special opening 8-11pm 17th June: Inselgluck/Kulturtage

The Berlin exhibition of Journeys with No Return is planned to open at Kurt-Kurt and is organized in association with the Kunstverein Tiergarten, concurrently with the 6th Berlin Biennale which opens on 10th June 2010 and the weekend of the Moabiter Kulkurtage, 17-20 June.The exhibition will feature 12 artists: KIRAN KAUR BRAR / ERGIN CAVUSOGLU / ADAM CHODZKO / JÜRGEN EISENACHER / MARGARETA KERN / MELANIE MANCHOT / OLAF NICOLAI / DENIZHAN OZER / ZINEB SEDIRA / MAYA SCHWEIZER / NASAN TUR / CLEMENS VON WEDEMEYER

www.kurt-kurt.de
http://www.journeyswithnoreturn.com/content/exhibitions/berlin.html

Project update, and the talk at the Tate Britain

Preparing the talk for the 28th State symposia at the Tate Britain has been an extremely useful process, which has enabled me to focus and get to the core(s) of the project and sieve out questions which are important for me and my practice. It brought together the material from the residency in Berlin, consisting mostly of the photographs from the albums of the 'guest worker' women who arrived to West Berlin between 1968 and 1973, from Yugoslavia, and my photographs of Berlin (showing mostly memorial places, where the past and the present intersect), with my own personal documents of migration to UK - asylum application, identification card, and visas. I also included photographs from my grandparents' album, who migrated to Germany as ‘guest workers’, and whose life story has largely inspired this whole project.

Through the photographs and documents, I wanted to bring out a narrative which emerged for me having immersed myself deeply into the research and the life stories of the 'guest worker' women. I noticed a great tension in their stories, and that is a tension between a yearning for home, an aspiration for material and social wellbeing and precarious immigration laws and policies, all connected (or rather ruled) by the ever-changing needs of the capitalist labour market. And that tension is still unresolved, amongst this particular generation of labour migrants, even after 40 years of living in Germany – for example most of them do not have German passport (though are allowed to stay indefinitely) and are now facing retirement and the same question which has haunted them since getting a year long visa and work permit in 1968: will they be going home? (Many have build houses 'back home', fully equiped with the best furniture, often these homes sit empty waiting for the final return...)

I am reminded here of Stuart Hall's quote: The classic questions which every migrant faces are twofold: ‘Why are you here?’ and ‘When are you going back home?’ No migrant ever knows the answer to the second question until asked. Only then does she or he know that really, in the deep sense, she/he’s never going back. Migration is a one way trip. There is no home to go back to. There never was. (Hall 1987:44)


I also raised questions which have become more pertinent to me as an artist, who is working more and more in ways which draw on ethnographic and anthropological methods and processes. These processes, include going into the communities of people whom I don’t know, in order to photograph or film, quite often being privy to personal information about their lives, which call for questioning the ethical dilemmas involved in this process of art-making. (For an insightful essay on the ethics of artist as ethnographer see An Ethics of Engagement: Collaborative Art Practices and the Return of the Ethnographer by Anthony Downey, in the recent Third Text issue 23: 5, 593 — 603).

Another question, which intrigued me and I raised at the end of the talk, is that of Saskia Sassen’s proposition of the border as a capitalist strategy. She writes in her book ‘Women, Men and the International Division of Labor’ that "the enforcement of national borders contributes to the peripheralization of a part of the world and the designation of its workers as a labor reserve. Border enforcement emerges as a mechanism facilitating the extraction of surplus value by assigning a status of formal or informal powerlessness to foreign workers generally and criminality to illegal immigrants (Petras, 1980)."
What I found interesting about this proposition (which she outlines in 1984!) is that border is a strategy, and migration is not some out of control force, as it is often portrayed in the media, but highly regulated place, servicing the needs of the market.

Finally I wanted to vocalise more, the relationship between history and storytelling [hi(story)], memory-archive-photography, and artists’ own positioning within. (yes, my talk was 20 minutes, these were questions at the end to open up the debate :) This complex and fascinating relationship, is/will be the main framework for the continuing of the Berlin strand of the 'guest worker' project. Treading gently between these two polarities of being an intruder and at the same time a recorder of (hi)stories, I aim to continue collecting photographs from the personal albums of ‘guest workers’, with the intention to build a form of an alternative archive, offering a multiple and intimate readings of history. Alongside personal family album photographs, I have begun writing short 'fictional' stories, based on the interviews with the ‘guest workers’, my grandparents, and my own memories of growing up in a ‘guest worker’ household in Yugoslavia, in the 70s and 80s. It seems to me that I am inching towards a 'book' of some sort, let's see where this will all take me, and I will bravely publish here later, an excerpt from a short 'fictional' text I wrote... I am also looking into collaborating with other writers whose interests intersect with art/photography and text...

The videos of the whole symposia will be available shortly, on http://borderlineproject.org.uk/

From March until June 2o10, I will have a chance to explore further some of the questions I raised above by being an artist-in-residence, at the University of Bath's department of Social Science and the Institute of Contemporary Interdisciplinary Arts. The overarching framework/theme for the residency is labour and I will be engaging with the staff and students across the University. In this process of engagement, I am very keen to open up the performative aspect of my photographic practice (which has drawn on documentary portrature) and look at the dynamics of collaboration and participation. In order to scrutinise that process, I will be looking at ways in which sociologists deal with the double-bind of research-representation. Throughout this process I will be writing a Blog, and also posting documentation/notes/images in the gallery space which will serve as a workshop-production space. To follow the GUEST residency please see a-n Blog: http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/597679

Tate Britain Symposia - 28th Sate: European Borders in an Age of Anxiety

I will be taking part in the forthcoming symposium at the Tate Britain.

28th State: European Borders in an Age of Anxiety
Tate Britain, Saturday 24 October 2009, 10.00–18.00

This symposium questions how artists and curators in Europe are currently engaging with ideas around borders, nationhood, social organisation and collaboration. What is role of art within this context, particularly in relation to the current state of European politics and increasing social unease within many rapidly changing populations? Invited international speakers include Shaheen Merali, Elvira Dyangani, and Margareta Kern.
Part of Borderline project, curated by Sonya Dyer.
Supported by Chelsea Programme, Chelsea College of Art and Design and City Inn Westminster

image: Guestworkers at AEG Telefunken, c 1973.
From the personal album of the 'guestworker' who wished to remain anonymous, 2009

Margareta Kern: On being a guest (or when histories become stories and stories histories)

As part of my recent art residency in Berlin, I researched an organised mass labour migration from the socialist Yugoslavia to the capitalist West Germany, which took place in the late 1960s. The labour migrants were called ‘Gastarbeiter’ or ‘guest workers’, alluding to their temporary stay. Many of these temporary workers never returned home. Through personal interviews with those who stayed in Berlin, and research into the specific historical and political contexts of the time, a narrative began to emerge, filled with tension between a yearning for home, an aspiration for material and social wellbeing and precarious immigration laws and policies, all connected by the ever-changing needs of the labour market. As well as drawing out this tension through images and narration, I also intend to explore the position of artist in re-creating and re-covering (hi)stories and memories (and in turn the relationship of those to contemporary collective historical and political narratives and myths).

Gastarbajteri nazaj doma - Migrant workers back home

The documentary film “Gastarbajteri nazaj doma” (Migrant workers back home) is a poetic portrait of three former migrant workers who left Yugoslavia in the seventies to try their luck in Germany. The economic boom of post-war Europe produced an increased demand of labour. Hence so called ‘Gastarbeiter’ (guest workers), mostly from Yugoslavia and Turkey, were invited to work in the car industry and custodial services. Whereas Germany became a new home for some of them, the protagonists of the film decided to return to their home country. However, being back home they had to realise that a lot of things had changed: not only people have changed, but also the political system – a new state was born. During insightful interviews, Malika, Jože and Marija speak about their experiences of leaving their families, living in a foreign country and returning home. A film by Stefan Kreuzer, Nino Leitner and Natasa Siencnik Produced by luksuz produkcija / Krsko, Slovenia (Youth in Action Workshop 2007).
Text from the website http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2736399417624166315#

The film was made during the 10 day workshop, organised by Luksuz production,who has been working on an international youth exchange programme involving film workshops at Trška gora in the vicinity of Krško since 2002. The films created at the workshop usually deal with current social themes (youth participation, cultural diversity, European identity, etc) and are available on DVD for festival distribution and also on the Internet. Some of these films have received international awards. In 2007 a 10-day workshop hosted 40 participants working on documentary films. Researches on cultural diversity were made in various countries and presented in the form of short films. Discussions and screenings were followed by work on documentaries under the tutorship of well-known film maker Želimir Žilnik.
http://www.drustvo-dzmp.si/festival/

ZELIMIR ZILNIK himself made a very powerful short film in 1975 called “Inventur – Metzstraße 11” where using a very simple setting of a tenement – mostly foreigners – come in as though walking down an outdoor staircase and introduce themselves and their life situations to the viewers.
"With this minimal setting, Z¡ilnik strips the administrative term "inventory," taking stock or a census, of its numerical and bureaucratic meaning. Although the position of the camera is fixed, as in a police situation, and each person identifies themselves by name, it is not the number of people that counts; indeed the line of people seems to be endless. This camera situation guarantees their individuality, because each person takes stock of their own situation in the Federal Republic of Germany. They decide for themselves how long they want to speak or what they want to say in front of the camera, also exhibiting embarrassment or pleasure in posing before the camera. All of them are performers of their own role. Z¡ilnik provides them with the framework they need for it.
Zilnik shot this short film in 1975 in Munich, which is only relevant to the extent that Metzstraße is in Germany. He lived in the Federal Republic of Germany from 1973–76, worked as a director and pursued the same goal with his films here as in Yugoslavia, (which he left after being banned from working) tracking abuses and becoming actively involved in discussions as a filmmaker. One of his films was then censored in the FRG as well. “Inventur – Metzstraße 11” is a film that, together with “Unter Denkmalschutz” (1975) paradigmatically shows property speculation in many large German cities. Formerly upper middle class residential areas are systematically turned into slums by being over-populated with guest worker families that usually pay highly inflated rents. Once the objects have been run down in this way, they can be sold – once the tenants have been given notice – as profitable office and condominium palaces."
Text from the website of a very interesting project PROJEKT MIGRATION