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CENTER FOR PERIPHERIES


Center for Peripheries is a collective operating at the intersection of social research and space-based art. It consists of three artists who stem from Europe’s different peripheries (the Middle East, the Caucasus, the Balkans), but reside and collaborate in Berlin—one of Europe’s most significant centers, and the EU’s (statistically) most populous city—which has throughout recent history embodied the dialectic of East and West. Aiming to explore the relations of power and the mechanisms of othering within and beyond the far ends of this dialectic, Center for Peripheries operates through small-scale interventions themed around different notions of everyday life, expanding them into analyses of wider political contexts.

centerforperipheries@gmail.com


























Impressum

MIT EIN BISSCHEN GLÜCK ... GROß GEWINNEN!

Group Exhibition with works by Mila Panić, Saša Tatić and Center for Peripheries

A good immigrant always speaks in German, no matter how broken; a bad immigrant only uses another language. A good immigrant submits their documents in the order they were listed; a bad immigrant misses one paper. A good immigrant has a job; a bad immigrant steals jobs. A good immigrant is a guest and returns to where they came from; a bad immigrant has German children. A good immigrant is grateful; a bad immigrant criticizes.

Observing immigration, integration, and naturalization not as legal processes or bureaucratic phenomena, but as equivocal notions, the group exhibition Mit ein bisschen Glück… groß gewinnen! pokes at the tensions inherent to any multicultural society, including Germany.
Quoting, skewing, or blasting open different experiences of abandoning one cultural context and joining another, the exhibition sets up Germany as a stand-in for the wider context of Western Europe as a geopolitical center. In repurposing narratives of immigrant anxieties, efforts or frustration – both rightful and self-righteous – the different works are simultaneously understanding and judgmental of those who migrate and those who “welcome” them alike.

There is no universal experience of immigration, and yet: that one look, that one smirk, or that one back-handed comment could not escape you if you have ever been ‘the Other.’ No worries, however: with a little luck, you might win big, too.