Your fear our capital. Your hate our mandate

The work by Marina Naprushkina, an artist of Belarusian origin working in Germany, grows out of her experience derived from contact with refugees. Although the disturbing slogan Your Fear – Our Capital. Your Hate – Our Mandate has a universal dimension, the collage of red and white prints forming the background to it clearly refers the slogan to the relationship between the native inhabitants of Europe (Germany) and newcomers from the wider outside. The tone of the inscription is clearly propagandistic, related to agitation activity, which gives it a political character, bringing it close to a programmatic slogan of some party.

Naprushkina’s artistic activity is strongly linked to her social and political activism. Being born in the authoritarian Belarus, her background, and the fact that she herself had to find her way in a new society, are not insignificant here. She is interested in exploring the mechanisms of power, its inherent tools of control and manipulation. The work Your Fear – Our Capital. Your Hate – Our Mandate grows out of these explorations, even though it is directly associated with another initiative by Naprushkina, the Neue Nachbarschaft // Moabit (New Nieghbourhood // Moabit), an organisation supporting the integration of immigrants into local communities and helping them to overcome linguistic and cultural barriers.

At the centre of Naprushkina’s work is fear, ANGST, written on one of the prints. She perceives fear as a collective experience and explicitly contextualises it as part of the relationship between Us and Others/Aliens. This Other has a definite face, hinted at by the texts used in the collage: dialogues and New Year’s greetings in Russian, inscriptions written in Arabic, a photograph of the stock in a Turkish shop, and a travel document issued to immigrants who have no valid passport. Whereas the fear of the Others is often discussed as a reason for their exclusion, Naprushkina points out that the Others also live in fear – a fear induced by racist attitudes, cultural resentment, language and economic barriers, the spectre of deportation. She indicates that there is political capital against the Other, one built on fear and capable of transforming this fear into other feelings, such as hatred, which may lead to violence. Fear appears in Naprushkina’s work as an efficient instrument for managing the society.

Izabela Kopania
translated from Polish by Klaudyna Michałowicz