The Schirn Presents Today All-Inclusive. A Tourist World
By Ryan • Jan 30th, 2008 • Category: News for Creatives (archives), Photography“FRANKFURT.-Tourism has long since become a crucial phenomenon of today’s mobile world society. The traces left by travelers all over the Earth give evidence of a continually growing tourist industry and mark the beginning of a global movement that drastically transforms present-day man and the spaces he passes through. The exhibition “All-Inclusive. A Tourist World,” on show at the Schirn from 30 January to 4 May 2008, presents numerous works depicting and critically questioning various tourist phenomena. Documentations, parodies and defamiliarizations of traditional tourist motifs, and dream images interlink with subjects like migration, tourist industry, and global communication. The project curated by Matthias Ulrich assembles works by about 30 internationally renowned artists such as Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, Ayşe Erkmen, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Tracey Moffatt, Jonathan Monk, Santiago Sierra, and Thomas Struth.
The exhibition “All-Inclusive. A Tourist World” is sponsored by Messe Frankfurt GmbH, Verein der Freunde der Schirn Kunsthalle e. V., and Smiths Heimann GmbH.
Tourism is a desideratum full of steadily recurring images of beauty, longing, recreation, and adventure. The tourist is on his way to these images to confirm, to duplicate, and to archive them as the résumé of his vacation. The British artist Martin Parr’s photographs, for example, depict tourist patterns of behavior frozen to clichés, as it were, and unfold a picture of the vacation activities of an underprivileged class primarily centered on his native Britain. The artificial tourist landscapes of the Austrian artist Reiner Riedler’s photo series “Fake Holidays” are based on similar stereotypes. They too confirm Peter D. Osborne’s theory that tourist photography mainly serves the purpose of confirmation and not of discovery.
Yet, the pictures’ appeal also changes their subjects. In accordance with the prevailing images, trite places turn into interesting destinations, and famous sights are used for whatever objective: there are world parks like the Shenzhen Window of the World with sights from all over the Earth or projects like in Las Vegas and Dubai with cliché elements from famous cities and cultures. Perfectly orchestrated places where you can ski in summer and get some Caribbean sun in winter are no less artificial and, at the same time, serve as bearers of desires. “
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