"Who If Not We Should At Least Try to Imagine the Future of All This?": Various Venues.

When the Netherlands took over the presidency of the European Union last July, it was the first full term to include the ten new member states. To celebrate this occasion, Holland implemented a vast range of cultural programs called "Thinking Forward." The visual-art component, a series of seven exhibitions instigated by Maria Hlavajova and collectively titled "Who If Not We Should At Least Try to Imagine the Future of All This? 7 episodes on (ex)changing Europe," comprised three different exhibitions in the Netherlands, as well as shows in Budapest, Ljubljana, Vilnius, and Warsaw.

At Witte de With in Rotterdam, parting director Catherine David invited Austrian artist Peter Friedl to "respond to the project's framework and to conceptualize the basis for a much needed critique by the project's position towards the so-called guests: Who is welcoming whom and to what?" Friedl decided to make an exhibition about Cyprus, which has been divided between Greece and Turkey since 1974. Although only the Turkish part has voted in favor of reunification, only the Greek part is currently EU territory. Friedl's DVD installation included slide projections of playgrounds as well as film excerpts, text, and two small video animations of blue sky. Friedl has often used playgrounds as sites of inquiry into the geopolitics of countries. Designed according to principles of ergonomics, health, and other social issues, playgrounds are seemingly devoid of politics and yet bring to mind Jean-Luc Godard's comment that "children are political prisoners."

At the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Leontine Coelewij and Geurt Imanse looked at the distinct historical sensibility of Eastern Europe, informed as much by recent dramatic changes as by the preceding period of stagnation under socialism. Each new beginning, it seems, is felt as a repetition of another, previous beginning, as several artists take specific recourse to earlier moments in history. Paulina Olowska revisited Malevich's instructional charts, part of the Stedelijk collection. Roman Ondak's Bad News Is a Thing of the Past Now, 2003, consists of two photographs, one showing the artist, the other his father sitting on the same park bench, each reading the same August 22, 1968, edition of a newspaper. The artist replaces his father at a moment when he was his age, but history, it appears, repeats itself.

Exhibition organizer Hlavajova herself collaborated with Gerardo Mosquera on "Cordially Invited" at BAK (basis voor aktuele kunst) and the Centraal Museum in Utrecht--a show about the restrictions and conditions attached to the opening of borders in a widened European Union. With twenty-two artists from across Europe as well as Cuba, this exhibition was both the most extensive and the most overtly political. But while addressing such questions as legal and illegal border crossing, xenophobia, and the systems of inclusion and exclusion, most of the works in the show managed to balance an acute sense of urgency with a highly conceptual visual language. Marko Raat's deadpan video documentary For Aesthetic Reasons, 1999, features Anders Kurg, an Estonian architectural historian and admirer of Danish modernism who has pursued requests for asylum in Denmark solely for "aesthetic reasons." De Rijke/de Rooij's slide projection Orange, 2004, simply aims at reproducing the precise shade of orange of the overalls worn by Guantanamo Bay inmates by photographing objects of that color, an enterprise made difficult by the chemical processing of color photography. Born from an overtly political national agenda, "Who If Not We ...?" ran the risk of cultural proselytizing. Its success and its topicality must be credited to the tenacity and rigor of the curators involved, but we should also thank the Dutch government for its trust in art as an agent of social change.

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