A good immigrant always speaks in German, no matter how broken; a bad immigrant only uses another language. A good immigrant submits their documents in the order they were listed; a bad immigrant misses one paper. A good immigrant has a job; a bad immigrant steals jobs. A good immigrant is grateful; a bad immigrant criticizes.
Observing immigration, integration, and naturalization not as legal processes or bureaucratic phenomena, but as equivocal notions, the group exhibition Mit ein bisschen Glück… groß gewinnen! pokes at the tensions inherent to any multicultural society, including Germany.
Mila Panić’s humorous and (self-)satirical series takes the horror and absurdity of bureaucratic processes of immigration head on; the installations from Center for Peripheries explore the questionable aspects of praise and judgment tied into the learned ideas of integration; and Saša Tatić’s large-scale pieces tap into the painfully natural confusion of being away from where one comes from – versus the sense of belonging.
There is no universal experience of immigration, and yet: that one look, that one smirk, or that one back-handed comment could not escape you if you have ever been ‘the Other.’ No worries, however: with a little luck, you might win big, too.
