Marwa Arsanios Delaine Le Bas, Helen Cammock, Andrew Gilbert, Manaf Halbouni, Jasleen Kaur, Mónica de Miranda, Harold Offeh, Ahmet Ögüt, Lerato Shadi
Syker Vorwerk – Zentrum für zeitgenössische Kunst
Syke, Germany
The conception of the exhibition goes back to the thesis that there is a critical art that deals with asymmetries and discrepancies of social reality and operates at the core of the art system. An art – so the particular focus of the exhibition – that starts from an expanded understanding of culture and society and is created by a type of art-making person who moves between cultures and thus overrides binary schemes of thought in the common coinages of the own versus the foreign, the autochthonous versus the allochthonous, the centre versus the periphery. An art and an art-creating individual – to put it succinctly – beyond homogeneity.
Using different means and aesthetic strategies, the ten artists in the exhibition highlight the critical reflexivity of contemporary art. In doing so, an artistic engagement becomes clear that does not result from the needs of an existing and evolving concept of art, but rather from a critical reflection on the factors and conditions of contemporary society, which keeps becoming more and more complex. Since they act between coexisting cultural contexts not only through their artistic practice, but also through the characteristics of their biography and way of life, they take a stand on the complexity of the common reality and draw attention to the dialogical moment in the encounter of cultural and subjective diversity.