Tour through "This land is your land I This land is my land"

About

This land is your land I This land is my land is supposed to be an exhibition that is evidence of the nearness in the afar and the impossibility of demarcating and existing in the simplicities of binaries, but rather thinking or being in points of intersection, crossroads, and junctions.
In the works of Antje Engelmann and Cyrill Lachauer, proximity and distance to land and self are a central theme.  The dialogical combination of their works, most of which relate to their travels in North America, is about the inscription of the human innature and the unnaturality of man-drawn borders. Folk singer Woody Guthrie wrote  »God Blessed America for Me« in 1940 – later to be renamed as »This Land Is Your Land« from which the exhibition has lent its title – as a sarcastic response to Irving Berlin’s  »God Bless America«. Not only is the current political situation about the American-Mexican border part of this investigation. The various stages of settlement of the continent in the past, present and future stand side by side as part of the same process. The irony of destiny is that the land in which This land is your land I This land is my land was born is the land which was forcefully taken away from the native peoples of the lands by successions of Spanish, Dutch, French and British colonialists.
For Galerie Wedding the artists have developed a meandering compilation of a multitude of new works that approach land ownership, which is always an assertion of power, from different perspectives, and a complex narrative about the possibilities of viewing landscape.