Description

The trails left by travellers all over the globe are part and parcel of the ever burgeoning tourist industry as well as the beginnings of a global movement characterised by misery and wealth in equal measure. The so-called global society seems to be a touristic one, determined and designed by the permanent movement of cultural and national identities. Thus tourism seems to be a respectively individual need for returning desires for images of beauty, yearning, adventure and recreation. This is where the show and the book start, reflecting critically upon the changes wrought by tourism in many of the works in which, for example, Martin Parr photographs clich?s from the leisure society or the young Austrian artist Reiner Riedler presents photos of artificial tourist landscapes based on stereotypes for his ?fake holidays?. \nTourism mobilises people, it demands and facilitates mobility with the effect that whole sections of countryside are transformed before our very eyes into artificial ?sights?. It then becomes absurd when actually dealing with a landscape untouched by tourism as in the film by the American Stuart Hawkins or in the provocative work by Santiago Sierra on Majorca. \n\nFor both the exhibition and the book these examples demonstrate the connection between three areas signifying a complex representation of the changing world and society through the narrow and unceasing activities of tourists, viz. tourist goals that are geared towards tourist experiences and are achieved via the routes of tourism. \nThe catalogue mixes many illustrations with travelogues and texts on internationally renown and active artists, for example: Atelier Morales, Yto Barrada, Guy Ben-Ner, Ergin Cavusoglu, Dragset/Elmgren, Ayse Erkmen, Fischli/Weiss, Stuart Hawkins, Mark Hosking, Christoph Keller, Tracey Moffat, Jonathan Monk, NL Architects, Walter Niedermeyer, Martin Parr, Philippe Parreno, Sascha Pohl, Reiner Riedler, Damien Roach, Ho-Yeol Ryu, Santiago Sierra, Thomas Struth, Won Ju Lim, Sisley Xhafa, Yin Xiuzhen