Galschiot opens Fundamentalism exhibition inside EU Parliament

8 sculptures w. bright and dark quotes from the Quran, the Bible and the Torah will spark debate inside the EU Parliament

Exhibition inside EU Parliament
Documenta14, Kassel – follow-up

On July 10^th EU parliamentarians will be presented with a sight they hadn’t expected to see.

600 of the darkest and brightest quotes from the Quran, the Bible, and the Torah can be seen on 8 of Artist Jens Galschiot's (DK) sculptures 'The Pillars of Scriptures', which throughout the week will be exhibited centrally inside the EU Parliament’s cubby room. The sculptures' screens present the religious quotes in 9 different languages. Galschiot and his crew will be there throughout the exhibition to answer questions and debate culture and religion. The sculptures are 2 meters tall and weigh circa 2 tons.

It is Bendt Bendtsen (European People's Party Group) who has arranged the exhibit, and it has taken 2½ years to get it through. The giant sculpture Fundamentalism should actually have been exhibited in the fall of 2015; here 30 EU parliamentarians from different countries and political parties used their vote to okay the exhibition of the sculpture.

But the exhibition was prohibited by The Bureau, who under the leadership of Martin Schulz came with a number of vague arguments about not being able to vouch for the safety of the sculpture. It seems they would rather overrule the parliamentarian's rights to exhibit than engage in an important and very relevant debate about the different religions in Europe. See Der Spiegel article

We hope to get many contacts so that the sculpture can get exhibited throughout Europe and kick-start this very difficult but necessary debate. More about the project.

Galschiot’s rate on the Documenta14 art exhibition in Kassel, Germany.

In June Galschiot and his crew went to Kassel in order to deliver a wakeup call the world’s artists, to get them out of museums and engage in the world’s development. It didn’t go quite as planned.

We had rented a boat in Kassel called the MS Stint and equipped it with 80 refugee sculptures. We then sailed up and down the Fulda River while letting curious souls on-board to talk about art, culture, the refugee crisis and political activism.

In just one day we had a few thousand visitors, and that proved to be too much for the recognized art exhibition Documenta14 – even though it actually has focus on the refugee situation. The owner of our dock received a call and with sweet irony barred the dock entry from both the ship and its refugees.

Any art within a kilometre of Documenta’s exhibition is strictly prohibited. But luckily jurisdiction over the Fulda River belongs to the Federal State of Germany and not the city of Kassel. So they couldn’t disallow the flowing art exhibition and we soon found another dock further down the Fulda River.

The local Medias were pretty interested in the story and suddenly The Refugee Ship became a local must see and one of the city’s favourite artworks on display.

It turns out that many of Kassel’s locals are sick of the elitist art exhibition, which has never exhibited a local artist and has even tried to sue a local artist, who decided to set up an art piece in a church during Documenta13 in 2012.

It is absurd that a “progressive” art exhibition prohibits art from being displayed; this seems to go directly against the very nature of art. It is a complete disgrace to come to a city and ban local artists from exhibiting themselves freely in their own city.

Documenta15 opens in 2022, and Galschiot already has big plans about setting up artistic free zones on the Fulda and in private buildings where artists can exhibit themselves freely outside of the city’s jurisdiction. So we are already looking forward to that.

Many warm (and exhausted) regards

Lasse Markus, Chief of Communications at Gallery Galschiot