Age of Nation

09. Sept. - 05. Nov. 2016.

Opening:

Friday, Sept 09, 2016, 7 pm

Nations are based on agreements that guarantee its residents as well as its minorities residing within the territory, basic rights and protection. Several processes and institutions are necessary for building the nation and stabilizing it. They ensure that integration within the territory happens and that the borders are functioning. It is clear, that through these processes and constructions of the national space, the own identity only comes with the price of the other. Common grounds and engagement arise from events, actions and confrontations. (Karlheinz Wöhler, “Die Kultur der 30er und 40er Jahre”, 2009).

The exhibition „The Age of Nation“ explores manifestations and tendencies which question established notions of nation and nationalism as well as mechanisms that try to change the bourgeoise-liberal model of nations: developments of racism, social exclusion, enemy images und radical nationalism. Contemporary art can contribute a lot to this topics which the exhibition shows: Artist from Slovakia, Hungary, Russia or Serbia deal in their works with problematic developments of the present. The artists indicate the strong return of the populist concept of the nation which is connected to unexpected and drastic crises, rather than the European idea of a common community of interests. They witness a reconfiguration of movements and ideas that migrate from the peripheries of a society more into its center. This flow entails a combination of deeply traditional, but rephrased ideas and seemingly forgotten moral concepts - partly coming from the beginnings of the nations - which offer familiar versions of future communities merged with the feeling of security. 

Those movements saturated with old imaginations, ideas and actions in a rephrased manner, aim to revive the concept of the spatialization of the nation - a spatialization which we thought to have already overcome with the European union. Artists therefore come upon a rich fundus as the mentioned processes are deeply linked with images. Images that play a huge rule, for example in the construction of the self and the other.