‘Welkom in Leiden?!’, Singelpark Leiden (NL)
Exhibition
2 September 2020 – 1 September 2023
The artworks of “Welcome to Leiden ?!” explore the theme “borders” in the broadest sense of the word, with the human experience as the point of departure. What does a border do to people? And what does a border mean them? During ones walk through the Singelpark, the works present the viewer with a variety of boundaries: psychological and inner boundaries that limit us unnoticed, biological boundaries such as the natural size of a group, borders that lie outside our daily vision, such as those of Europe, the recognizable and threatening visual language of border surveillance, and the boundaries within systems and ideologies and how one can break out of them.
The theme “borders” also immediately remind one of the refugee crisis. Who do we admit, who do we exclude, and why? However, boundaries are also needed to be able to live in freedom: to think and do whatever we want. Freedom for one therefore simultaneously means a restriction for the other. It is within the field of tension between usefulness and necessity, that concept of the “Welcome to Leiden?!” exhibition finds its origin.
Atelier Van Lieshout artworks on view: Cage (2017).