»Immigration no longer facilitates disconnection«
Interview with Alona Harpaz & Sharon Horodi

In September 2015, CBS News Facebook page ran a short, 36­second long video, shot at night. The video shows refugees who have just arrived by sea to the Greek island of Kos. One of them suddenly spies his young son and daughter, having lost eye contact with them in the darkness and mayhem of the voyage. Fervently hugging and kissing the two, the man tells them time and again, sobbing: »My dear ones, we’ve made it, we’ve made it to Europe.«

Watching this scene, artist Alona Harpaz knew she couldn’t just let it lie there. A co­founder of the gallery and cultural centre CIRCLE1 in Kreuzberg, Harpaz started to toy with the idea, eventually deciding to create a 3D neon piece that renders the phrase »My darling we have reached Europe« in bright, blinkering pink.

Nevertheless, when ID festival’s artistic director Ohad Ben­Ari inquired if she’d like to curate an exhibition this year as well, this time exploring the theme of migration, she recoiled at first, not to say panicked:

»It’s a full­on kind of theme, ridden with snags… and it’s also not my style — it’s in­your­face, ›hot‹, ›hype‹, while I take my time responding. But then I realized that my work, by then in production ahead of a CIRCLE1 exhibition, already explored this issue. So I was thinking, ›you’re already in it, why run away?‹«

As befitting a festival with a title that also denotes the initials of ›Israel­Deutschland‹, two German women curators were at first recruited for the curatorial team.

»They embarked on this project enthusiastically, but after a while decided abruptly to drop out, for political reasons, due to the Israeli connection. They cited reactions from their surrounding environment. It’s like something you’re not meant to tell — there’s usually an attempt to present the final outcome, omitting the crises along the way — but I reckon it’s actually something that should be looked into, rather than overlooked, because it is happening, and not as a precedent or a one­off. And lo and behold, we put this exhibition together nevertheless, and the nice thing about it is that the German curators did pull out, but Syrian and Turkish artists do participate.«

At this point Harpaz was joined by her partner Sharon Horodi — artist, curator and social activist, living in Berlin with her family since 2012. It was Horodi who talked Harpaz into sticking to the name suggested by the German curators before they had left: Mother, I have reached the land of my dreams, a variation on Harpaz’s neon piece.

»It’s the gift they left us«, Harpaz says, smiling.

Horodi:»Alona has two works in this exhibition, which in my opinion represent one of the key tensions explored here. The neon work addresses the migration of people who embarked on an arduous journey away from somewhere, illegally, literally or so to speak, and toss up and down in the high seas on their way to a safe haven; the other work is a video art shot in an airport’s passport control, addressing the ›respectable‹ migration of westerners, people of means, who can move from one country to another the conventional, legal way.

The exhibition straddles the register that spans these two poles, which in some ways are not really polarised. People experience migration, and it’s not in every context that the questions of where you come from and why you’ve come matter. Whichever way, we weren’t looking for illustrative migration­ themed works, we were looking for artists whose way of work was very much inspired by their existential situation as migrants.«

Harpaz:»Even works that engage with the refugee crisis directly handle it with care. It’s not Ai WeiWei taking his own lifeless, refugee­like image by the sea…«

Horodi:»One of the works by artist Anina Brisolla, for instance, is a ready­made of sorts —she presents a corporate video of a company manufacturing different fences. They talk about everything in this video, except the purpose of these fences.«

Quite a few of the works featuring in this exhibition cite texts or integrate them. Syrian artist Natalia Ali has an installation on display, made up of mouths »that look a bit like a fish mouth, or a vagina«, to cite Horodi, issuing the words ›Haram‹ and ›Halal‹, two key concepts in Islam.

»It’s a reference to kosher versus desecrated, right versus not­right,« Horodi adds, »the contrasts and poles can be found in the works themselves, as well as in the exhibition at large.«

Video artist Nezaket Ekici, who emigrated from Turkey to Germany at a young age, presents in the exhibition a work showing her reading a poem written by her father in his first days as a migrant in Germany, in Turkish, English, and German.«

Horodi: »Many of the works carry the parents’ generation on their shoulder. Her father arrived as an educated man, a teacher, while in Germany he had to take up manual labour. But he continued writing poetry. The poem he wrote in the early 1970s refers to the cultural gap and German attitudes to immigrants.«

Born in the early 1970s, Horodi and Harpaz themselves hail from a generation of migrants who has experienced immigration in two utterly different phases. Horodi first left Israel in 1995, immigrating to Sweden. »This move was a real cut. My family would send me newspaper clippings, to keep me informed… then, having spent another couple of years living back in Israel, I moved to Berlin four years ago and was very disappointed: I wanted to get away from it all, but that’s no longer possible. Media follows us wherever we go, and immigration no longer facilitates disconnection.«

Harpaz:»That’s right, I too had news articles sent to me when I just moved here, back in 2001… there was something incredible about it, because during the early years, I only knew German friends, I had married a German guy — I was completely out of touch with what Israel and Israeliness were undergoing, which definitely gave me a whole different take on this experience. The huge change media-wise, and later the setting up of CIRCLE1 gallery, restored this connection.«

Harpaz:»I do what I do with all my heart, but there’s also this sense of longing. I never imagined that I’d have Israeliness breaking into the frame. I never imagined that every once in a while I’d have to remove applications from my smartphone, just to take a break from Israeli media… I’m glad it happened, because it also restored my connection with my Israeliness art­wise, to allow it some room and feel at ease with it. I hear people talking about how they’redivided, not knowing where they stand. I feel I know who I am and I’m happy with it. I’m Israeli, and I’m here — it’s all very clear for me. There’s no sense of missing out because I’m not there.«

So is Germany really the ›land of your dreams‹?

Harpaz: »That’s the way I feel. Some Germans may find the title of our exhibition ironic, but for me, Berlin really is the land of my dreams.«

Horodi:»Actually, Germans were not the first on my list of addressees for this exhibition. When I thought who it was I wanted to attend it, it was mostly other migrants that I had in mind.«

Interview with Alona Harpaz and Sharon Horodi (Mother, I have reached the land of my dreams), prepared by Tal Alon (Editor of the Spitz Magazine Berlin)
You can also find the Hebrew version here: spitzmag.de

Exhibition opening
Friday 21 Oct 2016, 17:00 — 00:00, Studio B + C
exhibition

opening hours of the exhibition
Friday, 21 Oct 2016 17:00–00:00
Saturday, 22 Oct 2016 14:00–22:00
Sunday, 23 Oct 2016 13:00–21:00

artists: Natalia Ali, Bettina Allamoda, Anina Brisolla, Nezaket Ekici, Amir Fattal, Eldar Farber, Francesca Fini, Alona Harpaz, Olaf Kühnemann, Ella Littwitz, Shahar Marcus, Angus Massey, Alona Rodeh, Spacedigger, Amir Yatziv

curator: Alona Harpaz (CIRCLE1)
guest curator: Sharon Horodi
technical manager: Keren Shalev
curatorial texts: Hemda Rosenbaum
production: Revital Michali
coordinator: Inbal Levertov
public relations: Vanessa Lorenz, Dorit Rubin-Elkanati