Cream Magazine

Seeing the latest exhibition at the Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA) Borders/Borders by photographer Hale Tenger, you really feel as though you are there with the artist, in the thickof atrocities and political uprising wherever her lens has dared to go.

Tenger, a Turkish artist, has been capturing and collecting images of scenes from various political, historical and cultural realms since the 1990s – themes that question the relationship between personal memory and collective experience.

Physically, the exhibition starts with a zig-zag of a path that is helmed by walls of hundreds of photographs – snapshots of protests, political marches, urban poverty, and other geopolitical scenes that tug at the viewer’s senses.

While Tenger’s background is Turkish, the ‘Borders’ that this exhibition refers to might well be relevant to any nation that is currently battling with a sense of discord, dissonance and division. Ultimately, then, the exhibition makes way for dialogue around both global and local issues.

The visual and installation aspects culminate with a huge white space bordered up with barbed wire fencing, where in the middle sits a kind of military bunker, as if once slept in by a soldier or asylum seeker. As you step inside the bunker, you sense a certain claustrophobia that can only be a fraction of what real terror such a confined space might give a victim of war or person of political asylum.