Dieter Lesage & Christian von Borries

In spring 2016 the Berlin artist Christian von Borries was part of a search-and-rescue team on a civilian rescue boat off the coast of Libya. Due to the presence of a variety of media teams he found himself confronted with a setting that no longer had very much to do with rescuing refugees. Whenever there was a need to capture poignant images, helping took a back seat. For the team, rescuing people was first and foremost interesting narrative material for a film.

The project “Image of Rescue | Rescuing the Image” is an attempt to analyse and reflect on the dimension of visual politics in such undertakings and the reporting connected with it. The time-based media selected by the participating artists and theorists, each lasting ten to fifteen minutes and in a set designed by Arno Brandlhuber, is meant to formulate a series of artistic and theoretical answers to specific questions on visual politics in/of the “refugee crisis.”