Ilja Karilampi, Axel Petersén & Ira Shalit

Opening
23.11.2018, 7 pm

Exhibition
24.11.2018 – 20.01.2019

A life-raft was purchased by the agency from a flat-earther who as boy learnt to sail by the sea and now examines google-earth images for evidence of globe fabrication. The hawker saw enough, and gazes beyond the sea’s subtle curved horizon.

Two major tropes of the traveller exist: a longing wanderer steeped in a sense of exile and his counterpart, the nomadic citizen of the world, who is at home everywhere. Artists are normally expected to conform to the latter, to practice their research from a suitcase with a laptop and intermittent Wi-Fi. In foreign lands, the artists should develop a routine of translating unfamiliar situations into future exhibitions. This approach to foreignness and unfamiliar constellations is by no means a marginal competence for contemporary artists but has become almost inevitable. This type of mobility dates further back than the current ‘explosive growth’ of artists' nomadic behavior. For all field-specific peculiarities one should not ignore the connection between the currently prevailing economic conditions of a capitalistic working world. It has become a commonplace that in the context of a gig economy, mobility has become, alongside flexibility, a "cardinal virtue" and the contemporary artist the ideal personification of this work-life-amalgam.

When conceptualizing an exhibition about travelling, not many cities are as fitting as Frankfurt. The city is a hub for motion: Pumping people through the city via rail and highway, the airport is the interface and entry point for so many visitors to Europe. Another form of flow gets created through the financial activities in the city, embodied in high frequency trades transmuted in a nexus of fiber cables and data warehouses. We go full circle, if we understand the mobility as a social and economic condition of artists and culture professionals and, at the same time, a vector of social and economic development.

One aspect of travelling should not be unmentioned: The internationality of the cultural and creative sector is not necessarily accompanied by a growing liberalization of border traffic. This form of free floating between cultures and countries is only granted to a limited group of people. Passports are the countries they open, they are a yardstick of how many privileges his or her holder can claim and automatically exclude people with passports that are regarded as less of an asset. Leaving a massive gap between the utopia of travelling and the reality of state borders and human migration.

Even if certain groups are prohibited from participating in this flow, travelling has made a major contribution to our illusion of the world as a global village. Consequently, it comes as no surprise that many artists today are employing the language of travelling in their work. The spectrum of how artists are approaching this topic is manifold and diverse, but still there are certain clusters of shared interests or roles artists take on when they circle the topic.

The three artists that developed “Agency Travel” together with Felix Große-Lohmann represent the prototypical roles that artists take on when they create work in this complex constellation of global currents and multiple worlds:

Ilja Karilampi dives into the richness that the usage of an international language offers. He juxtaposes elements from public advertisement, music, fashion and nightlife for the viewer to decipher their origins and the hyper-meaning they create in their newly formed context. These symbols seem to be uncoupled from their place of origin; instead bound to one another through the rhythm of their flow and their formal resemblances. Separated from a specific place, they exude their own unique sense of ‘authenticity’. The work plays with one of the main motors that make contemporary life to what it is: The www.

Counter-movements to this decontextualizing tendency include strategies of deceleration, positioning and symbolic territorializing which aim to make a concrete grasp of space possible again. In pursuit of this, some artists engage with the particularities of places, documenting as well as reinterpreting traditions and pictorial worlds. Ira Shalit is using his role as artist and curator in shedding light on the societal level. This pays tribute to the argument that art cannot and should not be obscured of the geopolitical nuances of its production, distribution, and reception. Therefore, Shalit merges and frees artistic fields in-between borders of cultural practices. His collages, computer drawings, radio shows and interdisciplinary curatorial projects, create walk-in situations that communicate microcosms or 1:1 models of places for the visitor to experience and experiment.

As a film maker and by incorporating elements of journalistic practice into his own artwork, Axel Petersén occupies another important role for current artists: This investigative approach combined with a flirtation towards an exoticizing glance leads to something that French ethnographer Victor Segalen would have described as: “(...) the task of defining and laying out the sensation of Exoticism, which is nothing other than the notion of difference”. Here the jetset — airport coffee, safety on flight demonstrations and living on an airplane and out of a suitcase — is burning.

The artistic positions of “Agency Travel” oscillate between concrete and imagined perceptions of place, and through their narrative, new spaces are created. Referencing real places produces new ones, and borders are being continually overstepped only to be redrawn. Like vessels within a sea, the artworks come together, inviting the audience to participate in a dialogue, traversing the exhibition in a curiosity-driven voyage and hover between past and contemporary conditions, of fluid topographies and challenged expectations.

Anna-Viktoria Eschbach leitet gemeinsam mit Antonie Angerer I:Project Space in Beijing, China.

Husslehof
Koblenzer Straße 12
60327 Frankfurt am Main