MAIDSTONE, ENGLAND.- The George Rodger Gallery at the Kent Institute of Art and Design in Maidstone presents "Strangers to Ourselves – Ursula Biemann," on view through December 8, 2003. Ursula Biemann is a Swiss artist based in Zurich. In the last few years, she has produced several videos exploring the intersections of globalisation and gender. In this exhibition we will be bringing together four of these videos: Performing the Border, Remote Sensing, Writing Desire, Europlex (with Angela Sanders)

Performing the Border,1999, is set in the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juarez where the first US high-tech corporation was implanted about 20 years ago. The video discusses the sexualization of the border region through labor division, prostitution, the expression of female desires in the entertainment industry, and sexual violence in the public sphere.

Remote Sensing, 2001, traces the routes and reasons of women who travel across the globe for work in the sex industry. Voluntarily or not, women are displaced in great numbers from Manila to Nigeria, from Burma to Thailand, from Bulgaria to Europe: female bodies in the flow of global capitalism.

Writing Desire, 2000, focuses on the internet as a space for the construction of desire. It links the writing of romantic desire by means of electronic communication technologies to the increasing disembodiment of sexuality and

commercialized gender relations.

Europlex, 2003, made in collaboration with Angela Sanders, returns to the subject of the physical border, this time the Spanish-Moroccan border. It follows the smuggling women who strap multiple layers of clothes to their bodies, the daily commute of "domesticas" who turn into time travellers as they move back and forth between the Moroccan and European time zones, and the Moroccan women working in the trans-national zones in North Africa for the European market.