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of her own Jewish ancestors. The artist obscures and reduces the sea voyage undertaken by Ian Fairweather. A penniless Scottish ar-
death camps to deserted cages and fenced-in fields, which coa- tist who settled in Australia early, he set off from there in the 1950s
gulate at times into near abstract grid structures; as a result, the on a self-made raft on a daring tour to Timor, but, exhausted by
sheets, dark as sulphur or seemingly decayed and soot-blackened, adverse conditions, was stranded on the Indonesian island of Roti.
become metaphors of general suffering and enslavement. Collaging There, the inhabitants had provided him with clothes and food and
the figure of Pinocchio into the already cruel photo of vegetating in return taken his raft, dismantled it and divided it among themsel-
figures in the ghetto, reveals the merciless cynicism of the powerful. ves. After years of quarrels, Fairweather was able to return to Aus-
tralia via England. With ‚Argonauts of the Timor Sea‘, Stevenson mi-
Judging by her intent, Teicher Yekutiel could have uttered the phra- metically repeated this action and, after several stopovers, in 2004
se “If we could forget, we would be free”, but it is the Cuban Diango had a collaboratively built raft cut up at the Neuer Aachener Kunst-
Hernández who expresses this thought in one of his watercolours. verein by members of the so-called Twodo (two dozen), a group of
That Hernández luckily had his drawings with him on his flight from collectors from the NAK, with each participant choosing one of the
Cuba to Europe, shows just how impossible this wish is. They, like all pieces afterwards. By evoking this archaic culture of the exchange
the furniture and everyday items he has collected and assembled, of goods without money, Stevenson ideally hoped for an alternative
tell of his own memories and experiences, also in so far as they can to the capitalist financial system with its fatal consequences, espe-
inform about the state of the world in East and West. Highly nuan- cially for Australia and New Zealand. What is more, with further
ced, he weighs up the different political and social systems against interactive gift actions by the Twodos, he has shown the increa-
each other by their degree of utopian or realised form. Somewhat singly economically oriented art market a way to a communicative,
comparable to the ‚model builders‘ of the 1980s, his imaginative social approach to art that is about essential contents. Indeed, Ste-
models of thought criticise both socialist and capitalist aberrations. venson‘s works in the exhibition are titled ‚The Gift‘, among them a
standing ashtray assembled from parts of the raft.
In his extensive work ‚Argonauts of the Timor Sea‘ from 2004, New
Zealand‘s Michael Stevenson personally re-enacted an adventurous

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