A World Not Ours

A World Not Ours, a group exhibition focusing on the current refugee crisis and issues of forced displacement related – largely - to the war in Syria as well as other conflict zones. The exhibition began last summer at the Schwarz Foundation’s Art Space Pythagorion, on  he island of Samos, Greece, a location that has been

at the heart of the refugee crisis that broke out in 2015. The exhibition aims to counteract the standardised, simplified and one-dimensional portrayal of the refugee crisis, which is often reduced to images of rickety boats and the perilous sea crossings from Turkey and Libya, and instead looks into the before and after of this dramatic moment.

With his 2003-2006 sculptural installation piece, Sans papiers, Sven’t Jolle draws connections between ancient writing on clay tablets, people who have been forced to become ‘sans papiers’ [‘without papers’ or ‘illegal immigrants’], and the illegal trade in cultural artefacts. Using plaster replica sculptures that are inspired by votive figures from the earliest civilisations of the Middle East, ‘t Jolle raises questions about the presence of these (original) sculptures in major art museums. ‘t Jolle reminds us that such acquisitions—often buttressing the great classical museum collections of the world—were taken through colonial plundering of countries in the Middle East and developing world.