LEIPZIG.- Art Mûr is presenting Karine Giboulo’s first solo exhibition in Europe.

The Montreal-based artist creates elaborate miniature worlds that are reminiscent of dioramas and ethnographic museum displays. Behind their precious scale and warm colours are harsh observations and critiques of the world’s economic and social ills.

In the discourse of contemporary art, the migrant occupies a liminal position only available in theory. Existing within the in-between space of Nation and State, culture and unculture, possessed and dispossessed, they embody a subjectivity consistently objectified and as a result rarely understood, rarely the object of empathy. To be nowhere yet everywhere, nearby however far, and forever drawn to a situation most of us take for granted – a peaceful existence in the absence of threat, starvation, genocide, execution, persecution – is their plight. Karine Giboulo’s work is relevant to our contemporary moment, not for what it represents but how it represents it. In miniature, our dominance over the fate of the migrant rests with our status as conscientious observers.

No one is illegal. Every human deserves access to peace, prosperity, and the freedom to achieve their own agency, whatever that agency may be. Should it take small figurines contained within a mock barbed wire encampment, appropriately arranged in a gallery setting to remind us of the fact that our world system has consequence and the toll of this consequence is human suffering? Occasionally, in its purest form, art holds the possibility of reminding us about the choices we make each day, and inspires within us the will to create the world we hope to see, not the world we must represent.

(Excerpt of a text by MF Rattray)