Galerie im Taxispalais

Foreign & Familiar

with Martin Brand, Mark Dion, Carmen Dobre, Hans-Peter Feldmann, FORT, Coco Fusco, Sofia Hultén, Sven Johne, Joachim Koester, Peter Piller, Gillian Wearing, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Anna Witt, Tobias Zielony

The international group exhibition Foreign & Familiar is concerned with the phenomenon of the alien within one’s own culture and sphere of experience. On the basis of selected artistic positions the exhibition not only investigates the interrelations between the alien and the familiar, but also how ethnographic and sociological methods are employed in contemporary art. The exploration of unknown realms of life and entry to foreign terrain are always combined with an interest in social and cultural customs, in rules and modes of behaviour among specific social groups, as well as in the past and present of specific places. The exhibition presents fourteen artists that explore the alien as a place or subcultural niche, positions that make use of collecting and archiving practices or which are concerned with observation of and interaction with other people.

Since the documenta X, at latest, the international art discourse in our increasingly globalised world has keenly focussed on questions about the intrinsic value of things that a society regards as alien, and what it considers to be part of this. Art deals with complex socio-political and psychological topics that revolve around demarcation and segregation, voyeurism and inquisitiveness, anxiety, resistance and separation, while primarily attempting to chart mental territories. The exhibition Foreign & Familiar is located in this field of discourse, while directing our gaze to the phenomenon of the Other and what is alien to our culture, and to the interrelationship between what is foreign in our familiar world, and what is familiar in what seems foreign. The international artists participating in this exhibition, who belong to various generations, use conceptually informed photographs, videos and installations to trace out aspects of society that are hidden and suppressed. They pursue new tracks so that history may be read anew, question the ostensibly unequivocal nature of newspaper images, extrapolate reality along possible lines of development, or take a humorous, ironic look at what is closest to them. They question ethnographic and sociological methods by employing them in new ways, or by holding up a mirror to these disciplines. And common to all of the artistic statements is that the old idea of stylising or warding off the exotic, the strange and the foreign – whatever is meant by that – has long since become a thing of the past. The aim now is to bring it and one’s own world into a causal nexus and integrate the two.
The outcome is a complex panorama of images of the alien and the familiar, whereby it is a matter of visualizing specific identities and ways of life, of questioning cultural and social assumptions, and of visualizing new perceptual approaches.


Curators: Lotte Dinse, Jürgen Tabor