Through the Roadblocks: Exhibition Catalogue

Overview

Through the Roadblocks: Exhibition Catalogue is an catalogue showcasing NeMe’s that documents NeMe's ambitious art project addressing the realities of borders, conflict, migration, and the construction of cultural identity as these intersect with the socio-political landscapes of the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. A collaboration between NeMe, The Cyprus Ministry of Education and Culture and The Cyprus University of Technology – the exhibition project reunites visual artists, academics, and curatorial professionals to consider borders - geographical, political and cultural - as ever mutable, ever insistent. Throughout this work-group and associated symposium-events this global phenomenon – magnified in our epoch by events such as the recent global economic crisis, Arab spring and persistent refugee pressures – is examined and reconsidered in terms of its role in exacerbating Divisions, its amplification of a sense of Hybrid Identity and the cultivation of novel solidarities. Here essays, works of art, and joint creations reflectively examine the nature of borders, our experience of modernity, and potential pathways towards empathetic understanding.

Crossings both through the artwork and in the catalogue text asserts that an interdisciplinary approach should take on the responsibility to both reinforce and rethink established narratives and boundaries. Instead of one collective plea, the exhibition is an endeavour with several contributors talking for different regions, experiences, gender politics and age that would emphasise the porous nature of identity construction and that of our geographical locations, as well as a kind of dialogue over individual experience which borders on personal memory towards a more collective history and transmission of affect with the aid of installations and paintings which focus on experiences with displacement, as well as how one navigates on multiculturality. We will come to believe art to be a place to rethink the notion and space of cross, thus borders if ever exist must continuously be re-thought.