THIS LAND IS MY LAND

The exhibition This Land is My Land takes a critical look at contemporary global phenomena like the retrogressive search for national values and symbols as well as the longing for a collective creation of meaning. This Land is My Land thus presents artistic projects that take region as an example to ascertain that national identity is not a fixed entity but a complex, heterogeneous, contradictory, and modifiable construction.
The idea of ‘nation’ is produced and played out by different interest groups. This implies diverse inclusion and exclusion mechanisms: so-called strangers have to adapt to the culture’s national order. In reality, however, Germany is a globalized immigration country in which the notion of an established national order seems outdated. Nations today are hybrid creations composed of various ever-changing cultural, social, and ethnic groups. National cultural identity is subject to an unfinished process. Nevertheless, Germany’s ‘majority society’ requires migrants to assimilate to an indefinable German culture (catchphrase: integration courses) or its idea of multi-culti degrades the ethnically diverse to folklore (e.g., Carnival of Cultures, Islands, and similar undertakings).

This Land is My Land intends to identify the workings of the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion as well as the power structures of definition, break down well-worn patterns of thought regarding national self-sufficiency, and sensitize people for subtly diversified points of view.
Artists have been invited whose work utilizes the field of conflict known as cultural identity as a productive gap, observes the overlapping of national fictions with everyday life, and identifies the instability of traditional, national, and cultural classifications. The artists examine the rituals, emblems, and codes of national self-representation (Jun Yang, Korpys/Löffler, Locher, Heuck), go looking for traces of identity in Germany (Haberkorn/Johne, Hiller, Wüst, Grisey), reflect multiple identity by taking up self-images of migrant youth (Bock, Maza) or imagining role-plays (Entekhabi, Elsner), and analyze the role of the media in constructing images of others and oneself (Bauer, Jun Yang).

A brochure and a catalogue accompanying the exhibition are published by NGBK (ISBN: 3-938515-05-8)