European Attraction Limited Tours
Press release
For their first exhibition in France, Lars Cuzner and Cassius Fadlabi have formulated a specific artistic proposal that resonates with current social events and questions the ethical engagement of artists within civil society. Together, they create improbable projects that take the form of installations associated with media events. For LE CAP – Centre d’arts plastiques de Saint-Fons, they present an installation titled European Attraction Ltd Tours, which features a film of a refugee camp shot from a helicopter. The installation as a whole is a continuation of a project initiated in 2014 in Oslo, focusing on the notion of the “human zoo.”
Borrowing their mode of communication from mass media, they create a provocative work that questions the role of the image, as well as the civic and ethical responsibilities of the artist in society and the impact of their actions in the context of real-world issues.
European Attraction Limited began in 2014 in Oslo. On the occasion of the bicentennial of the Norwegian Constitution, Lars Cuzner and Cassius Fadlabi recreated a human zoo, Kongolandsbyen, originally built in 1914 by a leisure company named European Attraction Limited to celebrate the centennial of the Constitution. Beyond critiquing a culture of colonialism, the project also implicates the audience: its appetite for voyeurism and its taste for scandal.
European Attraction Ltd Tours in 2017 addresses another facet of the human park, now resonating with contemporary European geopolitical issues: refugee camps. The film produced for the exhibition at LE CAP – Centre d’arts plastiques de Saint-Fons critiques the obscene gaze that the media invites us to cast upon the other. Confronted with others and their pain (Susan Sontag), we Europeans are often so ill-equipped that we prefer to add filters, barriers, images, rather than face the reality. Worse still, the camp becomes a tourist zone that one can fly over without confronting any danger.
Cassius Fadlabi & Lars Cuzner, European Attraction Limited tours, 2017. Couresty: Artists and LE Cap-Centre d’arts plastiques de Saint-Fons