Traces and masks of escape

People flee war, persecution, or poverty and seek a way into foreign lands to start a new life. What stories lie behind the media reports of refugees? The art exhibition aims to tell individual stories through individual artistic positions and works, beyond the circulated (refugee) figures and facts, beyond media hype and political debates.

Since its existence as a Central European nation state, Austria has repeatedly been a destination for refugees. Those who fled were accepted as persecuted and rejected as “foreigners.” Depending on one's point of view, the iconography of flight changed. The spatial, quantitative, and cultural “transgression” could be captured in shocking or scandalous images. However, it also awakened artistic sensibilities and can be understood positively as an attack on entrenched pictorial conventions, as refugees also created new types of images here.

The escape often becomes an odyssey, and it only ends long after arrival. Identities must be concealed and changed for the journey, and the official “asylum process” is another masquerade. These aspects of a person, their masks, and the mental bridges between here and the place left behind become the subject of art: memories, fantasies, documents, fragments. It is not about staging the refugees as individuals, but about individual artistic perspectives of the 20th century and the present.

The exhibition presents works by artists living in Austria, such as paintings by Adel Dauood and photographs by Linda Zahra, who deal with their own experiences of flight in very different ways or reject them as a label of identification. Works by artists living in Austria, such as Deborah Sengl's photo paintings, address the issues of flight and migration, prejudice, and social and personal challenges.

Artists featured in the exhibition: Osman Ahmed, Basel Alsheakh Ali, Rania Mustafa Ali, Alaa Alkurdi, Khaled Barakeh, Jakov Bararon, István Bielik, Franz Blaha, Tanja Boukal, Sepp Brudermann and Anabel Rodriguez, Eva Brunner-Szabo, Robert Capa, Ramesch Daha, Danica Dakić, Adel Dauood, Friedemann Derschmidt, Mehmet Emir, Olga Georgieva, Rolf Gillhausen, Patricio Handl, Robert Jelinek, Anna Jermolaewa, Dora Kallmus, Lena Lapschina, Vadim Kosmatschof, Evelyn Kreinecker, Erich Lessing, Camila Lobos, Klaus Mosettig, Lisl Ponger, Florian Rainer, Faek Rasul, Zbyněk Sekal, Deborah Sengl, Alena Vadura-Bilek, Nina Werzhbinskaja-Rabinowich, Linda Zahra, and Carl Zahraddnik.