Exhibitions

EUROPE AS A REFUGE

Nave 16 Matadero – From 25th to 29th October from 11h to 21h Opening Wednesday 25th at 20h

The recent influx of refugees and migrants in Europe is often interpreted in media and political discourse as a crisis and a threat. TRANSEUROPA brings to Madrid a series of exhibitions by the curatorial and artistic partners Perpetuum Mobile and AthenSYN coming from the Athens Biennale, and the National Museums of World Culture in Sweden that build on creative cultural proposals and offer spaces for artistic processes of co-creation. The exhibitions, ‘Artists at Risk‘, ‘iHopP‘ and ‘UNIVERSITAS‘, are part of ‘Re-Build Refuge Europe’, a project led by European Alternatives and co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Commission, that brings together partners from the UK, Sweden, Spain, Finland, Germany, and Greece. The pieces brought together in these exhibitions all share the fundamental aim to break stereotypical imagery and counteract the dominant discourses and visualisations of ‘crisis’ and ‘threat’ of newcomers.

TRANSEUROPA provides a space to link up cultural and societal actors mobilised in different corners of Europe to exchange and build new cultural practices. As part of this exchange, Oliver Ressler also brings two audiovisual productions that reflect on the voices that go unheard in the so called “refugee debate”: ‘Emergency turned upside Down’ and ‘There are no Syrian Refugees in Turkey’.

ARTIVISM FROM THE EUROPEAN MARGINS

Lonja de exposiciones del Centro Cultural Casa del Reloj. From 25th to 28th October from 10h to 20h

Opening Thursday 26th from 18h – 20h

TRANSEUROPA opens a temporal transnational space for making voices visible from across Europe that use art as a form of political engagement. Artists that work daily at the local level in the margins of Europe to imagine and to put into practice new forms of politics through art. From women artists in Ukraine that use their work to respond to the social challenges in their country and reclaim feminism in ‘Women’s Texts: Feminist Art from the East‘, to displaced artists that have limited rights to participation and collective decision-making locally impacting their sense of belonging and perceptions of local cultural contexts in ‘The Voice of _____’.

With ‘Artivism from the European Margins’ Transeuropa brings to Madrid some astonishing exhibitions, curated by artists addressing tangible social and political issues that touch on the fundamentals of the idea of Europe. They propose that Europe needs to be understood outside of its physical space, in its relations with the world and to imagine a different society by crafting and uncovering a new language, new symbols and new art beyond borders and nations.