ABOUT_____________________________
BAR MAYER is a multimedia artist from Jerusalem. She grew up in an Ultra-Orthodox Jewish community that she left eighteen years ago. STELLA MERIS is a German/Swiss video artist with a fundamentalist Christian background. She left her community about ten years ago.
Starting in April the two artists will participate in a residency program of the F.K.Kollektiv - FotoKlub Kollektiv gallery in Berlin. During that time they will get into an intimate dialogue and a process of creation, in order to raise broader questions about identity and belonging. The event OPEN DOORS on the 19th of April marks the middle point of their common artistic work. The space will be showroom and laboratory at once.
Their work in progress will result in a duo exhibition at the FKK-Gallery from 1-31 July, curated by Zack Helwa. More information about the exhibition will follow.
MORE______________________________
The religious communities BAR and STELLA grew up in promoted their belief to be the only true way of living, and therefore a critical reflection about the absolute rightness of their views was utterly out of question. The often degrading ideas about non-Jewish, respectively non-Christian people were propagated by religious fundamentalism. In an artistic dialogue, the two artists explore similarities in power structures and mechanisms within such groups. How is a system of values that divides all people in "good" and "bad" imposed? How do the religious leaders manifest their authority? What rituals, actions and speeches were popular in the religious circles?
BAR and STELLA both observed an attitude towards “the other”, the non-believers, that was picturing them as people who are "lacking something", as people who either needed to be educated or avoided. A binary opposition which decried all non-Christian/non-Jewish cultures as incomplete was imposed, in order to define their own identity as superior and to gain power over the other.
The artists question the effect that religious ideology had on their own identity. Moving from a religious family background to a non-religious lifestyle shows similarities to an actual, physical migration. This raises the question "where meaningful knowledge is located." Feeling torn between completely different value systems and cultural codes makes it impossible to express the answer to this question "in the terms of one regime or the other". Finding oneself in between the religious and the non-religious culture is on the one hand confusing and challenging, as one lacks a language that could describe this place. There is an interesting potential in this unknown space. BAR and STELLA meet each other there.
