Critique of Pure Image - Between Fake and Quotation

The Exhibition

Curated by Dimitrina Sevova

Ursula Biemann

Contained Mobility

Synchronized double screen video installation, DVD 20 min., 2004.

Ursula Biemann is an artist, curator and videomaker whose work focuses on gender relations in economy, media, and geography. She exhibits her work internationally and has published books on art practice in the field, video essayism and geography and the politics of mobility. Current projects include “The Black Sea Files” a video complex on the Caspian oil politics. Biemann researches at the Institute for Theory of Art and Design at HGK Zurich lectures at the CCC program of the Arts Academy in Geneva, and teaches seminars and workshops internationally. www.geobodies.org

Contained Mobility enters the suspended time-space of a translocal form of life and engages with the politics of mobility and containment. The project looks at the present condition emerging from the changes that occur in and around the regulations of movements to Europe. Prolonged states of legal suspension is increasingly what people, who aren’t entitled to settling down anywhere, experience today. What used to be a state of exception has slowly consolidated into the prime mode of migratory subsistence. While none of the European countries officially cancel their commitment to the Geneva Convention on human rights and asylum, de facto, one by one, they are installing and implementing stringent laws on the national level that will invalidate it.