Abstract
In June 2017, the refugee rights group LGBTQI+ Refugees in Greece abducted a participatory artwork from the global contemporary art exhibit Documenta 14, held in Athens to highlight the city’s centrality to European imaginaries of crisis. They then released a ransom note and accompanying video in social media, in which they addressed the artist, Roger Bernat, condemning the fetishization of refugees by Documenta, and highlighting the precarious conditions queer migrants face on a daily basis. This paper takes up this action to examine the performative potential of such cultural interventions, their use of embodied actions which draw from the aesthetic languages of feminist and queer artistic practice, the forms of alliance their gesture enacted, and their careful negotiation of the tricky boundary of visibility/invisibility. It concludes that the strategic appropriation of urban space and digital platforms—a strategy it names “displacement”—served to interrupt Documenta’s more narrowly defined public sphere, forging a new space in which to appear publicly.
Highlights
In June 2017, the refugee rights group LGBTQI+ Refugees in Greece abducted a participatory artwork from the global contemporary art exhibit Documenta 14, held in Athens to highlight the city’s centrality to European imaginaries of crisis
[1] The exhibition was located in Athens to call attention to Europe’s economic, political and migration “crises,” which have become synonymous with Greece in Western and Northern Europe’s persistent differentiation from its Southern and Eastern Eurozone partners
Seeking to blur the boundaries of the art historical and the ethnographic, the exhibit took up the city of Athens as the site and the object of its curatorial gesture and performative practice
Summary
In June 2017, the refugee rights group LGBTQI+ Refugees in Greece abducted a participatory artwork from the global contemporary art exhibit Documenta 14, held in Athens to highlight the city’s centrality to European imaginaries of crisis. The ‘Open Letter’ format, opened a space of performative contestation in this broader sphere of artistic and performative activity – addressing both the material occupations of the city, and the virtual and networked operations of Documenta 14 as an institution, an idea, a set of social relations, and a potent field of mediations.
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