Border Colonialism | Grenskolonialisme / 2026
“I am not responsible for you trying to dim or control my light (or even fix my shadow by night).” Text fragment taking part of my work
Group exhibition Border Colonialism (for the exhibition ‘De staat van’)
What does the current state of the world mean for us as individuals, and what urgency does it bring to our artistic practice?
The exhibition brings together new and existing works that approach borders not as fixed lines, but as systems that are made and maintained—through bodies, language, infrastructure, and landscape. It starts from a simple, almost naïve question: what would a world without borders look like, and how else could things be?
Across the works, borders appear as tools that regulate movement and assign value, rooted in colonial histories and reproduced through political and technological systems. At the same time, they are questioned, disrupted, and sometimes quietly undone.
Some works look on different strategies of claiming spaces and marking territories with everyday gestures, while others focus on migration to Europe, the consequences of European migration laws on the African Country. Other works present borders beyond their physical forms—seen in the walls we build, the paths we walk, the spaces we inhabit, and even in the weight we carry in our bodies and minds; visible in fences, doors, and cages, but also in the invisible lines that separate memory, desire, and belonging. Elsewhere, the infamous Idiom ‘MAGA‘ is expressing its absurdity through endless variations, while others turn the exhibition space itself into some kind of border situation with projecting a red line from a watchtower, or building a fence.
Together, the works open up space to see borders as unstable and changeable—something that can be imagined differently. The exhibition includes photography, painting, sculpture, collage, installation, and text, and is installed in dialogue with the space and with room for performances and a talk with Albina Fetahaj, politicologist and author of the book Grenskolonialisme.
