SUPERFLEX present Foreigners, Please Don’t Leave Us Alone With The Danes! at the Biennale Arte 2024 in Venice

The theme of the Biennale Arte 2024 is Foreigners Everywhere, a suggestion that every place is filled with foreigners, and that we are all foreigners. Curated by Adriano Pedrosa, the exhibition focuses on artists who are foreigners, immigrants, refugees, or part of diasporic communities. It is in this context that SUPERFLEX was invited to reimagine their work, Foreigners, Please Don’t Leave Us Alone With The Danes!

In 2002, posters with the words “FOREIGNERS, PLEASE DON’T LEAVE US ALONE WITH THE DANES!” were put up in the streets of Copenhagen as a comment on the increasingly reactionary immigration politics in Denmark. The phrase was an adaptation of French graffiti from the 80s, retooled for a Danish context. During the Danish EU Presidency in 2002, Denmark’s immigration policies also became a pointof interest and discussion in the international press. The poster has since been widely presented in Denmark and abroad, including in exhibitions as a wall painting, and as a stack of free posters. Recognizing that political posters were often drowned out by the visual noise of the city, SUPERFLEX printed the text on an orange background, the color of an alert, so that it stands out in public space.

The message still resonates within the contemporary Danish political climate, especially in light of the fact that Denmark’s anti-immigration politics have continued to escalate, inspiring similar policies in other EU countries. In retrospect, Danish immigration polices seem like an avant-garde of xenophobic policy-making: today, all over Europe, parties on both the right and left run on platforms which stoke anti-immigrant sentiment and promise more closed borders.

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