Ursula Biemann

After the first presentation at KunstWerke in Berlin, and at Going Public ’05 in Modena, Ursula Biemann – one of the most known Swiss researcher and videoartist – will present in Italy, at Fondazione Olivetti in Rome, from 15 june to 6 july 2006, the project Europlex, promoted by aMAZE cultural lab (www.amaze.it) and curated by Claudia Zanfi.

Europlex is an “on going project” on such themes as borders, their mobility and variety, started by Ursula Bieman with visual antropologist Angela Sanders. It’s a work with videos and maps, which looks at the Spanish Moroccan borderlands. What we can call the border there is not a linear formation. It encompasses the Strait of Gibraltar with all its transversal traffic, the two Spanish Enclaves on the Moroccan side and the plastic covered vegetable plantations in Andaldusia powered by an African labor force. When we see geography as a spatialization of the relationships connecting systems ranging from the local to the transnational, it also becomes plain why, in border geographies, there are processes of extreme compression on all levels. The funneling functions of actual border stations intended to regulate the flow of people are only the visible points of convergence for connecting strands that are spread over a region or link up continents. At these bottlenecks, the hindrances of a mobile world have to get by without embellishing words. Until recently, Málaga and Almería did not see themselves as borders; nowadays, the whole of Spain’s southern coastline has to uphold the country’s European identity, however this is formulated. The simplest form is still, as ever, exclusion. Europe defines itself by its outermost edge. The artist will realize a site-specific installation for Fondazione Olivetti.

Ursula Biemann will be in Rome, at Fondazione Olivetti, for the opening day, to meet public and journalists.

Ursula Biemann studied art and cultural theory in Mexico and at the School of Visual Arts and the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York. Her art and curatorial work focuses on gender relations in economy, media, and geography, including a two-year project "Kültür" on gender and urban politics in Istanbul and videos on the U.S.-Mexico border, global sex industry and the Spanish Moroccan borderlands. Her video-essays "Performing the border" (1999), "Writing Desire" (2000),"Remote Sensing" (2001) and "Europlex" (2003) have been shown at Bienials in Geneva, Istanbul, Havanna and at festivals in Kassel, Duisburg, Chicago and Werkleitz as well as at international art exhibitions Manifesta 3 in Ljubljana, Insite Los Angeles, at the Modern Art Museum in New York, MACBA Barcelona, the Centre George Pompidoux in Paris, and Tate Modern, London. Curator of 2003 exhibition and catalogue "Geography and the Politics of Mobility" at the Generali Foundation in Vienna. She also published the artist book: 'been there and back to nowhere - gender in transnational spaces', b_books Berlin, and "Stuff It - the Videoessay in the digital age", Springer Vienna/New York, 2003. Current art research projects include The Black Sea Files on the Caspian oil politics and the Maghreb Art and Research Project on Mediterranean mobility. Biemann researches at the Institute for Theory of Art and Design at HGK Zurich lectures at the CCC program of the Arts Academy in Geneva, and teaches seminars and workshops internationally.

Pressetext

Ursula Biemann
EUROPLEX. Border Zones
Kurator: Claudia Zanfi