Artists at Risk (AR) Pavilion: mutatis mutandis

Artists: Babi Badalov (Lerik / Paris), Chto Delat (St. Petersburg), Lusine Djanyan (Sweden / Moscow), Fatoş İrwen (Diyarbakır), Damian Le Bas and Delaine Le Bas (Worthing), Issa Touma (Aleppo), Tito Valery (Yaoundé)

Exhibition: Prinzenstr 84.2, entrance from Oranienstraße and 4th floor
Party: Aufbau Haus courtyard, entrance from Prinzenstraße 85f

Curated by Marita Muukkonen and Ivor Stodolsky
Co-Founding Directors of Artists at Risk (AR) and Perpetuum Mobile (PM)

Public call
Our second public call is now open. AR-Residencies enables art-practitioners to take a “breather” from their home country, or to use the programme as a “stepping stone” to re-orient their professional lives. Art practitioners at risk of grievous suppression of freedom of expression, persecution or politically motivated threats to their basic freedoms may apply here. We accept urgent applications at any time.
 

Artists at Risk (AR) Pavilion – Berlin
mutatis mutandis (things being changed that have to be changed)

The complex trajectories, the violent injustices and gory specifics of the conflicts which put artists at risk—be they Anglophones in Francophone Cameroon, Kurds in Turkey, Roma in Europe, or any dissenting voice under any given repressive regime—are all radically different. Seen from the perspective of rights, however, all violations of human dignity and the freedom of expression are clustered under a general resemblance of illegality. Such  resemblances, alas, are fragmented by inequalities, within inequalities, within inequalities—the differences of class, race, gender, geography. Finally, as we reach the contemporary heights of domination over human bodies, minds and the planetary ecology—our defences, but also our differences practically vanish.

In other words—all is one, mutatis mutandis. This is emphatically not the tired plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose: the conservative excuse that humanity is just the same old, same old. The sheer scale of change is currently upending the anthropocentric paradigm. And just like "the few" see a herd to be bio-algorithmically filtered and censored, "the many" are building on newfound intersectionalities.

Refugees Will Come, as Babi Badolov’s wall-work asserts in this new Berlin edition of the AR Pavilion. To paraphrase him equally bluntly, in the manner of Brechtian plumpes Denken: wars will rage, regimes oppress, people resist, peace come—even if justice is never now.

The Artists at Risk (AR) Pavilion – Berlin: mutatis mutandis is a process or, one could say, a re-alignment of intersectional fragments, a field of trajectories finding a commons.

The Artists at Risk (AR) Symposium at the Nordic Embassies in Berlin  (RSVP) on September 10 (see above) includes current and former AR Residents, as well as institutional partners from Germany (including the new Martin Roth Initiative), Spain (BCCN) and the Nordic region (NCP network). Opening words by Antti Kaski, Minister, Embassy of Finland.

The Artists at Risk (AR) Pavilion is an exhibition format first launched as the AR Pavilion – Athens at the 5th Athens Biennale in May 2017, parallel to documenta 14. The AR Pavilion – Istanbul was part of the collateral programme of the Istanbul Biennale. The AR Pavilion – Madrid was a larger-scale exhibition at Matadero-Madrid.

The AR Pavilion – Berlin: mutatis mutandis at Gallerie Kai Dikhas starts the season with a new orientation for this gallery—the first, worldwide, to focus on artists of Roma and Sinti origin—by broadening its mandate and vision to communities worldwide in situations of heightened risk. The AR Pavilion—Berlin brings together artists, including also Roma artists, with a close affinity to the topics addressed by Artists at Risk (AR) alongside current AR-Residents and AR-Alumni.