“Di/visions (from here and elsewhere)”

“Di/visions (from here and elsewhere)” forms part of the First Thessaloniki Biennale, titled “Heterotopias.” As a group exhibition, “Di/visions” aims not only to showcase artists who move outside the mainstream but also to stand as a heterotopia, or “other space,” that contrasts with typical here-and-elsewhere binaries. Where others encourage global visions of the art world that are framed by a not-so-new discourse flaunting the benefits of economic globalization, curator Catherine David calls attention to divergence.

Given that the exhibition spans five different venues, it is remarkable that David has chosen to include just fifteen artists. In Yeni Tzami, originally a mosque, Anna Barseghian and Stefan Kristensen stage their project Armenography, 2005–2007, a new-media archive of interviews with and images of people and places historically significant to the Armenian nation. At the Centre of Contemporary Art, Taysir Batniji shows his photographic series “Péres,” 2005–2006, in which pictures of deceased Palestinian store owners inhabit the walls of their small businesses, seamlessly interwoven with advertisements and merchandise. In Warehouse C, Wafa Hourani’s Qalandia 2047, 2006—a detailed scale model of a camp near Ramallah—imagines life in the area in the year 2047, one hundred years after the division of Palestine. Maria Papadimitriou reconstructs a temporary settlement used by nomadic tribes, a yurt complete with pillows and blankets. In the State Museum of Contemporary Art, Alexei Kallima’s charcoal drawings illustrate young Chechens fighting and resting, in a fine balancing act between the cruelty depicted in some scenes and the beauty and fragility of the medium. Finally, in the Museum of Byzantine Culture, Hassan Khan’s video installation, Kompressor, 2006, unites text with images of urban landscapes.

David’s decision to emphasize borderlines—rather than to “cross” them, however symbolically—reads as an endeavor to provide an alternative definition of the biennale: one that neither supplies the conditions of an encounter between the contemporary aesthetic output of diverse regions and cultures nor, for that matter, celebrates differences. On the contrary, the show serves as battleground for conflicting historicities, a place where divisions can be made visible and productive as expressions of dissent.