Opening of BR 23/24

It is a sunny late summer day when the Aachen Art Museum fills up with guests early in the day. Most of them are meeting for the first time: curators, residency hosts and the artists in residence that make up this year’s round of Borderland Residencies. Once again, it is an international group that will live and work in the region during the autumn months. Together they represent what makes Borderland Residencies so unique: protagonists of an international art scene as guests in a European art region between metropolises and rural areas. They have travelled to the Borderlands from Singapore, China, New York City, France, Romania, Germany and the Netherlands, adding an international perspective to local discourses.

After greetings by Sibylle Keupen, Mayor of the City of Aachen, Jörg Vomberg representing the Minister of the German-speaking Community of Belgium, Eva Birkenstock, Director of the Ludwig Forum and Lene ter Haar from the Consulate General of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Düsseldorf, co-curators Eva Birkenstock and Holger Otten lead the visitors through the exhibition „Illiberal Lives“. The thesis of the unfulfilled promise of freedom in liberal economies inevitably raised questions about freedom in the artistic profession: Which norms and laws restrict the freedom of artists and where do they enable it? And what value does a politically guaranteed freedom have if economic constraints limit the possibilities of artists? These and other aspects were considered in an open discussion, moderated by Lene ter Haar. Afterwards, the new Borderland generation introduced itself to the guests. Their agendas include a wide variety of research interests: Ecosystems and ecotones; bogs and marshes; the migration of plants; mechanisms of misconception and miscommunication; memories of space; regional rituals in death; collective memories and unknown history; and multilingual poetry among other topics will be explored over the coming months.