Art Calendar – Current Exhibitions in Germany

While the European Union is enabling compete mobility for its citizens within its borders, the community of states is hermetically sealing itself off to the outside. Wire fences, motion detectors and specially trained border guards on the external borders of the EU ensure that no illegal refugee can succeed in entering “Fortress Europe”. Desperate asylum seekers therefore try ever more risky routes, with dramatic consequences: between 1991 and 2011, according to an estimate of the human rights organisation Mitgeurop, over 16,000 people died in attempts to immigrate to the EU.

It is an unfamiliar picture of Europe that the photographer Eva Leitolf draws in her exhibition Postcards from Europe at the Sprengel Museum in Hanover. Since 2006 she has been photographing the external border posts of the EU to show how European society treats immigrants. Leitolf, who was born in 1966, combines the unpeopled photographs with short information texts and stories that describe the situation on the spot. But she never seeks to dramatise the fates of refugees. On the contrary, she is interested in the system that is behind the sealing-off of the EU and appears to be the same along the entire external border of the Union, whether in the Spanish enclave of Melilla on the Mediterranean coast of Morocco or in the 4,000 inhabitant village of Záhony on the Hungarian-Ukrainian border.