Boatpeople
Installation, Graphics, Photography (ongoing)
Margret Kohler-Heilingsetzer started 2006 with ship/boat installations, with print-graphic, drawing, expressive terracotta-passengers who are constantly growing in numbers. Each of the by now over 1000 heads has an individual character, draws attention within the crowd of different ethnicities
Since the 1990s, the artist, inspired by several visits to Mexico and Peru, has been studying outer-European indigenous cultures, which inspired her to create small terracotta heads – an ongoing project since the year 2000.
Her fascination with the sea, with beaches and tides, captured in photographs and graphics, led Margret Kohler-Heilingsetzer to the coasts of Spain, Mexico and, above all, Italy, where she was exposed to the fate of ‘boat people’, migration and asylum policy.
The “Boat People Installation” 2017 uses the bow of the white ship first presented at the Künstlerhaus in 2006. It is the beginning of an ongoing project, dedicated to Euro¬pean migration politics, especially that concerning “boat people”. Until 2015, nine installations of different kinds of boats were constructed in Austria, Germany, Spain and Italy. The artist uses the vessel as metaphor for common fate, escape, departure and illusions of a better life also in her prints. During the last years she has collected headlines, articles and photos from the print-media on this issue for collages on the first ship. “Departure and Arrival”, borders and the “Fortress Europe” are also themes of the graphic-print series and the offset-print collages.