Today Ivar and me did find time to visit Brussels before the opening of Update02 at 21:00 in Gent.
We visit the exhibition Holy Fire at Imal, were we play around with the “Media Mirror” of Alexei Shulgun and Aristarkh Chernyshev
Later we also visit the exhibition “No Place – like Home Perspectives on migration in Europe” at Argos. Especially the work of Ursula Biemann “Sahara Chronicle” turned out to be of interest for me: it also dealt with issues of mobility, but it did focus mainly on African-European migration. The work consists of a series of short video’s: all small portrays of the nodes in the chain of migration, showing it as an everyday practice, way of live….
All the projects in the exhibition had this approach more ore less, and it made me thinking of smth I had wondered about before….
In Netherlands recently a book was published by former Middle East correspondent Joris Luyendijk: “Het zijn net mensen”, (Almost Human) The main conclusion of this provocative book is that our image of the Middle East is colored by all kinds of filters. One of the most important of these, for the written press as well as the visual media, is television networks. The book tries to reveal the filters itself, and thus the difficulties of nuanced journalism and the impossibilities for a naïve audience to see trough these meganisms, let alone get a real idea of what the world outside the democratic fortress of Europe really looks like. For me it is somewhat frustrating that this argument totally neglects the works of artists like presented in this show. I would like to drag Joris Luyendijk to this exhibition, and show him, there is more to representing the world than mainstream journalism alone. Everybody who did read the book, and feels now frustrated about these information filters is a potential audience for this kinds of shows, but how will we make the two worlds -art and journalism –really meet?