You are cordially invited to the opening of the international group exhibition Beyond Borders on Tuesday, 28 September, at 7 pm, at Gallery of Contemporary Art.

BEYOND BORDERS
Gallery of Contemporary Art and Likovni salon Gallery
28. 9. - 5. 12. 2021

Tara Najd Ahmadi, Nika Autor, Center for Political Beauty, Vesna Bukovec, Lana Čmajčanin, Ana Teresa Fernández, Jošt Franko, Majd Abdel Hamid, Ibro Hasanović, Maja Hodošček, IRWIN, Richard Alexander Lou, Alban Muja, Lara Reichmann, Sandra Schubert, Helene Thümmel & Evelina Świnecka, Hannes Zebedin

The history of mankind can be read as a history of defining and shifting territorial boundaries. Today borders are primarily a means of controlling flows of people and thus represent a complex socio-political phenomenon that has a decisive impact on people’s lives. In defining an individual’s or a nation’s identity, the border appears as an element included either in representations of historical struggles for citizenship and heterogeneous cultural struggles or in utopias and ideas for transforming the world’s common democratic imperative.
The exhibition Beyond Borders presents fragments of reflection on the influences of borders that define people's living space, push them to the margins of society, make it difficult for them to live in dignity and change their identity. We want to encourage reflection on certain border areas that have raised permanent problems over the last thirty years or where border-related situations have worsened. In their works, the artists outline the real stories and testimonies of groups and individuals in civil society, whose lives have been affected by political borders. Through the artistic interventions presented, they interpret the causes and consequences of the divides in different geopolitical landscapes. They highlight situations related to border crossings and travel, the issue of minority rights, language, citizenship and work, and the separation of families. They talk about the current state of migration flows in Europe. In some projects, they move from utopian potentials to solutions with an activist undertone. The artistic investigations and interpretations of situations at the external and internal borders of Europe, as well as at the border between the USA and Mexico, reveal the impressions of the border areas, personal stories or family tragedies, and paint a picture of the map of how these sharp divides are experienced. The works capture a rethinking of historical truths and geopolitical phenomena, but also alternative solutions that we want to highlight as spaces of potentiality if not of the future.
The international group exhibition Beyond Borders, a collaboration between the Centre for Contemporary Arts Celje and the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Koroška, will be presented in two venues (CSU and KGLU), striving for different conceptual focuses through a common idea, expanding and transforming them through the artworks and the artists presented in the two galleries. By attempting to contextualise the themes and artworks in a flexible way, we also go beyond the boundaries of the purely physical transfer of the exhibition.

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Curators: Maja Antončič, Andreja Hribernik

More: https://csu.si/en/exhibition/beyond-borders/