Programme
Is this the time for art?
The Museum of Forgetting focuses on the current migratory landscape, the precarity of work and life, and the consequences of Europe’s politics of borders and surveillance. Art on migration confronts us with the problem of how to represent the politically unrepresented, and how to exhibit an on-going and man-made catastrophe. It forces us to ask whether this is the time for art.
Addressing the issue of migration in the context of art is political in a different way than when art decides to cut loose from its traditional institutional settings in order to bring art into the community and connect with people. The project, then, is more about directing the attention of that community towards those who are excluded from it, or whose presence is increasingly questioned in Europe. Such a move serves to reshuffle and further problematise the order and logic of the contested quad: artist-work-institution-audience. Which artistic strategies seem to work, and which do not?
At Ormston House, Is this the time for art? will present works by artists Núria Güell (Spain), Daniela Ortiz (Peru) and Xosé Quiroga (Spain), and Oscar Lara (Sweden/Peru). With images and experiences from the realities of the migration system in Europe and its consequences for individual lives, their works almost wrench themselves out of the art frame by exposing what is regularly suppressed and forgotten in the public sphere.
The selected works adopt visual modes that avoid and challenge aesthetic amelioration and stereotypical victimization of the migrant “other”. This, in turn, allows a decisive predicament to surface, one that requests our attention: how punitive migration policies, detention centres and border controls manage to escape the wider public gaze yet constitute central pillars buttressing our political community and economic order. Maybe the border does not lie at the fringe of the political compound, but at the heart of its self-understanding and political logic?
About The Museum of Forgetting
The Museum of Forgetting creates art exhibitions and room for reflection with a focus on social, political and cultural forgetfulness. Our projects are not tied to any one specific form of expression or genre, but come together in the ambition to look critically at current political issues, memory and forgetting.
We have previously collaborated with international and Swedish artists and critics: Santiago Sierra (Spa), Björn Melhus (Ger), Karen Land Hansen (Den), Erik Pauser (Swe), Coco Fusco (USA), Dror Feiler (Swe), Saad Hajo (Syr/Swe), Kalle Brolin (Swe), Kristina Müntzing (Swe), Daniel Peltz (USA), Ewa Einhorn (Swe), Jeuno Kim( Swe/South Korea), Johanna Billing (Swe), Gonzalo Frasca (Uru), Maria Friberg (Swe) and many others.
Admission is free and all are welcome.
