REMOTE CONTROL
Jasmin Werner
13 Sep - 26 Oct 2024
Jasmin Werner’s artistic practice employs sculptural forms to explore the infrastructures and
lived experiences of global migration. Her works address the aesthetic and political dimensions of labor
migration by attending to its unseen economic and emotional transactions. In her latest body of works
presented in her second solo exhibition Remote Control at Galerie Guido W. Baudach, Berlin, Werner’s
installations offer a glimpse into the economies and communication technologies that migrants use to
sustain transnationally dispersed lives.
The focus is on the Filipino diaspora, to which the artist herself belongs as a second-generation
descendant. Two roller shutter objects inspired by shop windows in Berlin-Moabit and taken from the
Send Money Fast series of works from 2023 refer to migration as such on the one hand and to the
widespread money transfer services that link home and abroad in the lives of migrants in financial terms
on the other, while various new shelf sculptures with inbuilt smartphone imitations refer to so-called
"click" or "troll farms", which can be found in secret in many places, particularly in Southeast Asia,
having a lasting influence on online communication and thus on the entire formation of opinion - not
least among Filipinos, who live abroad in large numbers as a result of state-organized labour migration
maintaining contact with their family members primarily via messaging services and social media.
Remote Control reflects what the sociologist and migration researcher Earvin Charles B.
Cabalquinto calls the “ambivalent intimacies” of digital technologies in contemporary migrant life.i While
mobile phones are essential for sending remittance payments and maintaining the rituals of family life,
they also make local and diasporic families vulnerable to surveillance and digital disinformation. This
ambivalence is palpable in Werner’s Aquarium, Gulf Madhyamam, and Bhoy, Yuri & Sisko (all 2024), in
which the phone replicas are placed adjacent to or against mirrored grids that evoke an apartment
complex in which the artist lived in Makati, Manila—the financial center of the capital—as well as a
cardboard fragment from a “balikbayan box,” a parcel shipment typical for the country sent by overseas
Filipinos back home. The artist’s conjoining of remittances, mobile phones, and disinformation
contemplates the possibilities and perils that arise when digital technologies become the site in which
home is produced and negotiated. Remote Control thus invites a reckoning with how the bonds of
home and belonging can exist beyond fantasies of nationalism that open transnational families
communicating online to control at a distance.
lived experiences of global migration. Her works address the aesthetic and political dimensions of labor
migration by attending to its unseen economic and emotional transactions. In her latest body of works
presented in her second solo exhibition Remote Control at Galerie Guido W. Baudach, Berlin, Werner’s
installations offer a glimpse into the economies and communication technologies that migrants use to
sustain transnationally dispersed lives.
The focus is on the Filipino diaspora, to which the artist herself belongs as a second-generation
descendant. Two roller shutter objects inspired by shop windows in Berlin-Moabit and taken from the
Send Money Fast series of works from 2023 refer to migration as such on the one hand and to the
widespread money transfer services that link home and abroad in the lives of migrants in financial terms
on the other, while various new shelf sculptures with inbuilt smartphone imitations refer to so-called
"click" or "troll farms", which can be found in secret in many places, particularly in Southeast Asia,
having a lasting influence on online communication and thus on the entire formation of opinion - not
least among Filipinos, who live abroad in large numbers as a result of state-organized labour migration
maintaining contact with their family members primarily via messaging services and social media.
Remote Control reflects what the sociologist and migration researcher Earvin Charles B.
Cabalquinto calls the “ambivalent intimacies” of digital technologies in contemporary migrant life.i While
mobile phones are essential for sending remittance payments and maintaining the rituals of family life,
they also make local and diasporic families vulnerable to surveillance and digital disinformation. This
ambivalence is palpable in Werner’s Aquarium, Gulf Madhyamam, and Bhoy, Yuri & Sisko (all 2024), in
which the phone replicas are placed adjacent to or against mirrored grids that evoke an apartment
complex in which the artist lived in Makati, Manila—the financial center of the capital—as well as a
cardboard fragment from a “balikbayan box,” a parcel shipment typical for the country sent by overseas
Filipinos back home. The artist’s conjoining of remittances, mobile phones, and disinformation
contemplates the possibilities and perils that arise when digital technologies become the site in which
home is produced and negotiated. Remote Control thus invites a reckoning with how the bonds of
home and belonging can exist beyond fantasies of nationalism that open transnational families
communicating online to control at a distance.