to/after/beyond the border

The feeling of driving through a barrier ... Painting and border soundtrack from a past, when border facilities seemed to vanish bit by bit. An associative visit of 22 border checkpoints. Accomplished while the borders to all neighbor countries of Germany were open, after the Schengen Agreement, passable without passport controls. Are they getting controlled and reactivated again now? The art project »Nach der Grenze« - which is German for »to/after/beyond the border« - is like a mirror to former optimistic hopes for a freer world and questions history. At the border you don't stay. You pass it. To open borders and to close them elsewhere. The painter Silke Markefka and the writer/artist Nikolai Vogel have collaborated on art projects and exhibitions for years alongside their individual activities. In their project »to/after/beyond the border« they visited Germany's border crossings to its nine neighbouring countries. Silke Markefka transformed her impressions into paintings of medium and large size. Her border paintings are less about realistic representation, but more about a landscape of memory, the repainting and uncovering of layers of time. With the means of paintig this happens in a intuitive way that opens many references for its viewers and uncovers their own experiences. Nikolai Vogel captured the accustic border settings with analogue recording devices and described the impressions from the border in an associative text. The tape machines, reel to reel tape recorders, portable desktop cassette recorders and dictation machines or voice recorders that were used are also coming from an vanishing era - in this way they are brought back to consciousness. Their use at the border reminds one of eavesdropping and surveillance. Cars are coming from the front and from the back, the border is a place for automobiles. The project includes the art forms of painting, photography, literature, field recording and performance. This publication serves both as a reader and an artist's book for their long-term project. It features excerpts from Nikolai Vogel's »border texts« and offers a glimps of Silke Markefkas's »border paintings«. The colors in it, the voice and the corresponding »border sound« can only truly be experienced in exhibitions. Like in 2024 at Spandau Citadel in Berlin at the »Zentrum für Aktuelle Kunst (ZAK)« in the show »Vom Teilen | About Sharing | O Dzieleniu - Kunst an der (polnisch-deutschen) Grenze« - which means »Art at the (Polish-German border)« - and in 2025 at Muffatwerk Munich where »Nach der Grenze« was presented in a huge overall view. And in 2026 in the Schengen Museum aboard the ship »Prinzessin Marie-Astrid Europa«, the historic site, where the Schengen Agreement was signed!