Nevin Aladag, Aysun Bademsoy, Ayzit Bostan, Yusuf Etiman/Basso, Özlem Günyol, Mustafa Kunt

With the exhibition ALMAN MALI (Turk. F. ‘Made in Germany’) Kunstverein München presents contemporary art from Germany. The group exhibition positions itself as an immediate reaction to 'Made in Germany', an exhibition opening in Hanover in May 2007. As the press release states, the title 'Made in Germany' has to be understood "as programmatic in so far as the exhibition links the question of artistic identity not solely to place of birth and biography, but negotiates it in relation to the place of production of the works".

This seemingly progressive disjoining of questions of artistic identity from questions of national origin, however, allows once more that intercultural dynamics are only discussed within a mercantile vocabulary of the conditions of production imbedded within the parameters of regional city marketing.

'Made in Germany' employs cultural hybridity as a marketing tool; cultural hybridity however is also a central ideologue and political precondition of regional competitiveness in an global economy, an economy that seemingly postulates new liberties on all levels, while reducing it’s negative side effects to the level of individual responsibility.

ALMAN MALI responds with an ironic, yet concentrated focus on only one of many forms of intercultural identity in Germany. The participating artists can not only be characterised by the negotiation of their real-live identities between a German and a Turkish background, but more so the process of intercultural identity construction figures as a central aspect of their work itself. While consciously focusing on only one aspect of what we acknowledge as a complex discourse, ALMAN MALI opposes the shift from a culturally, socially and politically defined discourse of identity towards the universal language of a global market as suggested by Hanover’s 'Made in Germany'.