Published 1 SEP 2024

Opening – 13 SEP 2024, 6-9 pm
14 SEP until 26 OCT 2024

Jasmin Werner’s artistic practice employs sculptural forms to explore the infrastructures and lived experiences of global migration. Her works address the aesthetic and political dimensions of labor migration by attending to its unseen economic and emotional transactions. In her latest body of works presented in her second solo exhibition Remote Control at Galerie Guido W. Baudach, Berlin, Werner’s installations offer a glimpse into the economies and communication technologies that migrants use to sustain transnationally dispersed lives.

The focus is on the Filipino diaspora, to which the artist herself belongs as a second-generation descendant. Two roller shutter objects inspired by shop windows in Berlin-Moabit and taken from the Send Money Fast series of works from 2023 refer to migration as such on the one hand and to the widespread money transfer services that link home and abroad in the lives of migrants in financial terms on the other, while various new shelf sculptures with inbuilt smartphone imitations refer to so-called “click” or “troll farms”, which can be found in secret in many places, particularly in Southeast Asia, having a lasting influence on online communication and thus on the entire formation of opinion – not least among Filipinos, who live abroad in large numbers as a result of state-organized labour migration maintaining contact with their family members primarily via messaging services and social media.

Remote Control reflects what the sociologist and migration researcher Earvin Charles B. Cabalquinto calls the “ambivalent intimacies” of digital technologies in contemporary migrant life.ⁱ While mobile phones are essential for sending remittance payments and maintaining the rituals of family life, they also make local and diasporic families vulnerable to surveillance and digital disinformation. This ambivalence is palpable in Werner’s Aquarium, Gulf Madhyamam, and Bhoy, Yuri & Sisko (all 2024), in which the phone replicas are placed adjacent to or against mirrored grids that evoke an apartment complex in which the artist lived in Makati, Manila—the financial center of the capital—as well as a cardboard fragment from a “balikbayan box,” a parcel shipment typical for the country sent by overseas Filipinos back home. The artist’s conjoining of remittances, mobile phones, and disinformation contemplates the possibilities and perils that arise when digital technologies become the site in which home is produced and negotiated. Remote Control thus invites a reckoning with how the bonds of home and belonging can exist beyond fantasies of nationalism that open transnational families communicating online to control at a distance.

Jasmin Werner’s artistic research in Manila and Paete, leading to this exhibition, was supported by the Goethe-Institut Philippinen.

ⁱ Earvin Charles B. Cabalquinto, (Im)mobile Homes: Family Life at a Distance in the Age of Mobile Media. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), p. 104.