“Project Europa: Imagining the (Im)Possible”
This group exhibition, organized in conjunction with the University of Florida’s Harn Museum of Art, takes up the democratic idealism and lived contradiction of the European Union some twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. That event in 1989 marked a physical and symbolic turning point, heralding the reunification of the continent, this time under the aegis of an imagined community dedicated to human rights and multiculturalism. It is in the examination of these fault lines that “Project Europa” shines.
As much as it is now convention to refer to Europe as a concrete entity, the themes of boundaries and barriers, be they topographic or social, are foregrounded here as objects of investigation. Francis Alÿs’s video The Nightwatch, 2004, documents the release of a fox—traditional symbol of the leisured chasse au renard—after hours at the National Portrait Gallery in London, following its clandestine movement between genres and historical periods, in effect highlighting the rigidity of class and social capital in the UK. Bruno Serralongue and Yto Barrada—working in Calais, France, and Ceuta, Spain, respectively—use photographic documentation to articulate the persistent travails of border crossing and migration into Europe’s open societies.
While those projects are more geopolitically literal, there is also an undercurrent of contained violence evoked consistently in the exhibition. Danish group Superflex’s projection Burning Car, 2008, is perhaps the most overt instance, but Andrea Robbins and Max Becher’s pictures from 2003 of strip malls in central France suggest the more subtle violence wrought by the homogenizing effects of globalization. More harrowing still, Eva Leitolf’s photo and text series “German Images—Looking for Evidence,” 2006, depicts tranquil German towns that were the sites of brutal hate crimes. Leitolf’s pictures are a perfect microcosm of “Project Europa,” which manages to concisely look beneath the banal, technocratic veneer of neoliberal Europe, exposing its hidden tragedies and the work that remains to be done.
