THE PAST IS A FOREIGN COUNTRY

The international exhibition entitled The Past is a Foreign Country presents the works of artists that materialize places from memories, animate invented geographies, ask questions concerning their connection to identity and analyze the nature of remembering and forgetting.

The exhibition area is arranged by the Dutch artist Jeroen de Vries, who thus refers to phrenology – the picturesque scientific theory of the turn of the 18th century that binds together geography and the human mind. It described the brain as a mosaic of areas, different in form and structure, that are responsible for the various physiological functions of the body.

Despite the fact that the 19th century metaphor of the human brain did not find scientific confirmation, it brings about the connotation to the phenomenological approach to place, which was propagated by humanistic geography in the 1970s. Humanistic geography defines place as an area accumulating emotions, habits and customs. Places appear gradually, they gain their "bulge", their complexity and features over time, in the process of gathering memories and meanings.

The Past is a Foreign Country creates a map of recreated and invented places, an accumulation of various emotions – nostalgia, despair, irony, happiness – thus posing the question: what is place today?

THE PAST IS A FOREIGN COUNTRY 22.01.2010 - 02.05.2010

artists: Johanna Billing / Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukács / Banu Cennetoǧlu / Šejla Kamerić / Deimantas Narkevičius / Agnieszka Polska / Jasper Rigole / Slavs and Tatars / Jutta Strohmaier / Levi van Veluw / Ingrid Wildi / Krzysztof Zieliński / Edwin Zwakman

curators: Aleksandra Kononiuk, Agnieszka Pindera exhibition design: Jeroen de Vries graphic design: Kasia Korczak & Boy Vereecken

THE PAST IS A FOREIGN COUNTRY
Kuratoren: Aleksandra Kononiuk, Agnieszka Pindera

Künstler: Johanna Billing, Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukacs, Banu Cennetoglu, Sejla Kameric, Deimantas Narkevicius, Agnieszka Polska, Jasper Rigole, Slavs and Tatars , Jutta Strohmaier, Levi van Veluw, Ingrid Wildi, Krzysztof Zielinski, Edwin Zwakman