Regionale 23

The concept of home has become more fragile. It has long since ceased to simply be the place where you are born and grow up, surrounded by friends and family; where the language of the family home is also spoken in the streets and at school. A place that is synonymous with belonging, security. People often move for study or for work, but—unfortunately and increasingly—crises, fear and danger also cause or even force many to leave their own four walls or home behind. The artists invited to this year's Regionale at Kunsthaus Baselland all live and work in the region, in France, Germany or Switzerland - but their home is more. They come from Ukraine and have fled to Basel from Russia's war of aggression. They come from different cities and regions of Switzerland, Germany, France, Catalonia, Peru, Argentina, Eritrea etc. to study, live and work as artists in the region. They have spent extended periods of time in places like South Africa on scholarships to work and experience the country. The region we are in, called the tri-border area, unites much more than three countries, because the people who live here for shorter or longer periods of time and enrich us come from all over the world - voluntarily or for political reasons. What does homeland mean today, when many of us have left for new places or countries to make a new home? Why do we use the word homes so rarely, when it is what would correspond to many of us? Thus, the exhibition shows precisely these circumstances of our here and now; it addresses in different ways ideas or constructs around places of coexistence, of origin, of temporary residence, of emotional attachment - but at the same time also reflects on those that they had to leave behind. Moments of being on the move, whether voluntarily and involuntarily, are also thematized here. With their works, the invited artists pose the decisive and at the same time urgent question that needs clarifying today: How do we want to live in the future? How do we want to shape the future together? And not least: What will it take for us to bring about change - in society, culture, politics, nature - so that we can live together with respect and openness in all our differences and diversity? (Text by Ines Goldbach) The Regionale is an annual group exhibition developed in the context of a cross-border cooperation of 18 institutions in Germany, France, and Switzerland with a focus on local contemporary art production in the three-country region around Basel.