Pine, acrylic sheets, metal, tobacco leaf, wood stain, varnish. 2025
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Funded by the complex social, economic, and structural challenges of global neoliberalism, Breaking the Course of the European Boomerang looks at how we can counteract the current rise in inequality within Europe without reverting to imperialism. Inspired by the historical solidarity between workers‘ unions across Europe and the world at large, the exhibition unfolds through various artistic actions developed by the artists involved who explore strategies and ideas relating to labor, education, and the use of social and natural resources.
Europe has never been resourceful. The fact that it overran its resource capacity at the end of the 15th century is, in part, what motivated its colonization of other parts of the world. In our present time, formal imperial relationships have been transformed into more hidden ways of economic exploitation and resource grabbing. Amidst the decolonization following the Second World War, Europe, and the West of it in particular, secured the survival of their imperialism through the establishment of various global neoliberal projects, such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank Group. Framed as neutral, in part even charitable, structures, these institutions maintain a status quo: where the poorer (but often more resourceful) nations of the world remain under the control of the richer, through debt and trade arrangements.
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