DORTMUND.- Where does Asia begin and where Europe end? What influence do the borders have and who draws them? These are the key questions posed by the multi-annual art project "The Border" which the Goethe-Institut stages in conjunction with numerous partner institutions in Eastern Europe, Germany and Central Asia in 2017/18. Having toured the cities of Moscow (Russia), Sankt Petersburg (Russia), Krasnoyarsk (Russia), Kiev (Ukraine), Tbilisi (Georgia) and Minsk (Belarus) the exhibition is now on view at HMKV in Dortmund until 8 April, 2018. In 2018 it will continue to travel to Yekaterinburg (Russia), Almaty (Kazakhstan) and Tashkent (Uzbekistan).

The exhibition includes 23 artistic positions of the younger generation from eleven countries - Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Germany, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. The artistic media are diverse: videos, interactive sculptures, giveaways, postcards, a neon installation, films, newspapers, a sound installation, wallpaper designs, teacups, photographs and a karaoke station.

The exhibition project “The Border” explores and reflects upon borders and the origin of borders of various kinds: as territorial exclusions or, conversely, inclusions; as cultural, personal or social dividing lines; as an instrument with which to distinguish between “us” and “them” which actually generates this dichotomy in the first place. Thus the word “border” should be taken as a metaphor, as a conventional, received image, which is subject to change – a pressing issue for Russia and the former Soviet republics, as well as for Germany and Europe. The geographical and cultural border between Europe and Asia is the topical thread running through the exhibition. The project approaches these topics from an artistic point of view and cultural dimension: “Our aim is to promote the most diversified analysis of processes and motives of and reasons for the appearance of borders,” states Astrid Wege, Head of Cultural Programmes at the Goethe-Institut, Moscow.

The project focuses on the young generation of artists who present their insights into and reflections upon the matter at the travelling exhibition in Eastern Europe, Russia, Central Asia and Germany. In her series of photographs “The Edges of Gilea”, Anastasiia Zhyvkova explores three natural “cordons” in the South of her homeland in order to illustrate the abstract notion of “border” using wholly visual means.

Stanislaw Mucha (born in 1970 in Nowy Targ, Poland) takes a geographical approach to the topic initially and goes on the hunt for the centre of Europe in his film "Die Mitte" (The Centre) (2003/04). However, straightaway a good dozen places in a radius of 2,000 kilometres lay claim to being the "centre" of Europe, thus the director and his crew embark on an entertaining, sometimes burlesque, sometimes tragi-comedic odyssey all over the continent.

The group Where Dogs Run (founded in Yekaterinburg in 2000) turns to the subject of temporal borders. The smallpox vaccination scar is a physical mark or emblem of every person who grew up in the USSR. People belonging to the younger, “smooth-armed”, generation appear to live on the other side of the border, as if they were a different biological species.

The electro-mechanical theatre “Phobia of the Other” demonstrate how these distinctive marks were made.

Olga Jitlina, (born in 1982 in Saint Petersburg, Russia) together with a group of artists and migrant workers from different countries in the post-Soviet space, searches for common cultural traits. In her work “Nasreddin in Russia”, she explores the binding, unlimited power of humour. Can laughter, at least temporarily, make people forget about the things that divide them? Can humour provide protection from racial prejudice? The notion of freedom plays a crucial role in another work – “All Borders Are Within Us” by Viron Erol Vert (born in 1975 in Berlin, Germany). The work takes the form of a headscarf with a women’s hairstyle printed on either side. When a woman dons this headscarf, she “tries on” one of these hairstyles, though her head remains covered. Thus, it suggests a solution for Muslim women (or non-Muslim women in Muslim countries) to the necessity of covering their heads.

The installation “100 Pialas” by Katya Isaeva (born in 1980 in Karaganda, Kazakhstan) is a kind of cultural research conducted on the basis of one artefact. In the Soviet era, a trip to Central Asia was one of the few possibilities to get acquainted with another culture; people willingly brought pialas as an exotic souvenir. Each object has its own story, and together they constitute an allegorical narrative about cross-cultural interaction. Something like cultural “field” research underlies the work “19 a Day” by Taus Makhacheva (born in 1983 in Moscow, Russia) who, accompanied by the wedding photographer Shamil Gadjidadayev, visited – uninvited – nineteen random weddings in Makhachkala within a day. The artist congratulated the newlyweds respectively, danced, ate and took stereotypical wedding photographs under the professional supervision of her assistant.

For his multi-layered work "We Are From Texas" (2002-2010), the Kazakh artist Alexander Ugay (born in 1978 in Kyzylorda) photographed people and places in Kazakhstan and Texas. Although taken thousands of kilometres apart, Ugay's photographs don't give anything away about which countries they were taken in, with the effect that the borders between continents, cultures and landscapes disappear. This is because the real border, according to Ugay, "doesn't [run] between the East and the West but between justice and injustice, natives and foreigners".