Nayla Dabaji & Ziad Bitar plus Joanna Rajkowska

A flag and a coat of arms placed on the roof and at the entrance door of Lokal-int suggests that we are looking at an official building. Based on the color distributions of flags from the Middle East, the work of Nayla Dabaji and Ziad Bitar (Lebanon) represents an ironic perception of an idealized “Union of West Asia”.
Inside Lokal-int Joanna Rajkowska (Poland) is presenting tree pictures of her „Territories” Cicle.
The first one presents The Museum of Art (Das Kunstmuseum) in Bern with a big tent installed in front of it. The tent is not a tourist entertainment. The photo of it is taken in the area of Susya near Hebron in the Palestinian Occupied Territories.
The second shows The Playground (Der Spielplatz) at Aare river with the checkpoint assembled into it.
The third one pictures The High School (Die Gymnasium), which is now the PROGR building, where the view from the beautiful arched window shows a distant hill with an outpost – the avantgarde of the Israeli settlement, where soldiers watch and defend another piece of land to be taken over.
All three locations that were chosen are places where the education process of shaping a citizen takes place – a playground, a high school and the museum of art. In all these communal places we are thought what is right and what is wrong and how to behave inside of a community.
The visual match of the elements typical for the Israeli occupation (checkpoint, outposts) with a very familiar view of an European city is quite surprising. There is very similar logic in a way all the security elements are constructed.
In the case of a Palestinian tent in front of the museum we have a notion of an absolute discord. It might be believable only as an art installation. And this probably how we accommodate the strange, unfamiliar and foreign elements – to make it safe we can only label them as art and thus deprive them of its native difference.

Donnerstag 09.04.09 18h
www.lokal-int.ch