SOFTEX - Christian Vagt
Photographs of a Camp
Vernissage - 01. November 2016, 6-9pm
Duration - 02–12 November 2016
Visiting Hours - Tue to Sat 2-7pm and by appointment
Location - SomoS, Kottbusser Damm 95, 1st Floor, 10967 Berlin
From 2–12 November 2016 SomoS presents Berlin-based photographer Christian Vagt’s “Softex” Series. It consists of fifteen large scale photographs which depict refugees and their guards, beyond the fences of the Softex refugee camp in Greece.
The exhibition will be accompanied by an artist talk about the refugees’ situation and its reflection in photography and other media.
CHRISTIAN VAGT - ARTIST STATEMENT
Softex is a military and police run camp in an industrial region of Thessaloniki. Refugees live under appalling conditions in tents in the former warehouse of a toilet paper factory and the wasteland behind it.
In 2015, the passage from the Middle East via the Balkans was the most important route for fleeing to western and northern Europe. In 2016, some European countries closed their borders. The refugees were interned in camps. The attempt to distribute people across Europe failed due to the refusal of many states to shelter them. By declaring non-European countries as safe countries of origin, some states are attempting to keep the refugees out of Europe entirely. The refugees that succeed in entering Europe are detained under the Dublin Regulation in the so-called safe third countries along the EU's external borders.
"Greece could end up becoming a giant holding pen for refugees, performing the same controversial role for Europe that Nauru and Manus Island perform for Australia in the Pacific. If the situation does not improve, then what we have instead is an Australian-style system, where Greece becomes Nauru,” the Guardian writes in an article about Softex.
The images were made in three days in June and July 2016. I photographed from a moving car, in part to let chance flow into the creation of the image. Accident creates images that intellect could never make.
I did not want to recount the fates of individuals, nor fake proximity, nor enable the spectator through pity to reassure himself of his humanity and therefore to find relief. This kind of pity replaces the gesture of causing change.
So I am exhibiting photographs of the fence, obscuring yet transparent, and the acts behind it that it is meant to conceal but that it spans a screen for: tents, people standing in line, a rubbish bin, a heap of sand, a man kneeling, a mother and child, the military and the police and the postures of power.
THE ARTIST
Christian Vagt is a photographer based in Berlin. In the nineties, he documented the everyday life of squatters in East Berlin and worked as a club photographer in Berlin‘s punk and queer club SO36. In 2009, his photographs of gay punks and skinheads in the gallery of the Tallinn Art Hall in Estonia attracted attention. “His photos aren't staged, in fact they are snapshots often resembling film clips. This effect is deepened by the seriality of his photos.“ (Ants Juske, Eesti Päevaleht). The Sprawl, a photo series of Kim Gordon, then singer and bassist of the band Sonic Youth, was exhibited in 2010. In addition he shoots reportages in New York, Siberia, Central Asia and Bosnia. In 2016, his photographs of SO36 appeared in the book SO36 – 1978 until Today accompanied by an exhibition at Knoth and Krüger Gallery. The images of the exhibition Softex at Somos Art House were photographed on a trip along the Balkan route in the summer of 2016, until then the most important passage for refugees on the way to Western Europe.
DATES
01 Nov 2016, 6 p.m., Opening
03 Nov 2016, 6 p.m., Artist Talk with photographer Christian Vagt
11 Nov 2016, 7 p.m., How we help: Open and moderated discussion
12 Nov 2016, 6 p.m., Closing
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