António Ole
* 1951 Luanda, Angola; lives there.
see the biography
Ole's massive installation The Entire World / Transitory Geometry (2010) makes visitors to the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin keenly aware of aspects of intercontinental migration and cross-cultural ties. The artist has built a wall of containers that covers the entire length of the western wing of the building's cour d'honneur, in which works by Joseph Beuys are permanently installed. The container wall not only evokes the earlier partition of the city, which the Berlin Wall, erected in 1961, came to cruelly symbolize, but also serves as a reminder of the centuries-old history of trade between Africa and Europe.
Although the installation The Entire World / Transitory Geometry is reminiscent of the improvised and precarious shanty constructions one might find at the fringes of so-called "Third World” cities, the fact that plenty of the used materials come from Berlin also points to the often unspoken squalid living conditions of immigrant populations existing in the outskirts of "First World” cities. Hence, the juxtaposition of the quiet decorum of the building's neo-classical architecture and the visual rebelliousness of his installation also speaks to continuing tensions between dominant established ciphers of tradition, civilization and the nationhood on the one hand, and on the other, competing, unstable forces resulting from the inevitable existence of disenfranchised and disaffected immigrant cultures and peoples in the heart of Europe.
The Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum for Contempory Art - Berlin, inaugurated in 1996, houses permanent collections and has an active program of rotating exhibitions.
(From texts of the organizer)