The public commotion surrounding an art monument by the Syrian-German artist Manaf Halbouni in front of the Dresden Frauenkirche in 2016–2017 can be called typical for our time: three big buses, which in an absurd way were placed vertically next to each other on the square, as if they were a barrier in a small street in a situation like warn-torn Aleppo, to protect people from snipers (fig. 1). But just as significant is the fact that, in Dresden, this bus barrier stands alone in a wide space. Pedestrians are free to walk to the left and right of it. Generally speaking, it represents the freedom we have in Europe. Does this make sense at all in Dresden? Certainly it does. Firstly, because there are people, calling themselves Pegida (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West), who discriminate against foreigners, especially those coming as refugees from the East. Those who seek help and hospitality are “welcomed” by Pegida with hate. But there are enough people in Dresden who have the mentality of hosts. In fact there are not many immigrants in Dresden at all. The hosts may understand this art action as a sign for “Freedom, Peace and Humanity,” and this is its meaning. Secondly, like Aleppo, Dresden has a violent past of bombing. Born in Syria in 1985, the artist refers not only to motifs and stories of his homeland, but also of his guest land, where people arrived on buses to find shelter, but found new enemies, too. The work integrates two sides of a coin. On the one hand it works as a mirror for three sorts of viewers: immigrants, their hosts, and the members of Pegida. In this way it highlights the actual situation in Europe. On the other hand it also illustrates the long story of the dialogue between art inside and outside Europe, which is still relevant today. Typical for this Western tradition, Halbouni worked with the strategy of using everyday objects in art, introduced in 1913 by Marcel Duchamp, known as readymades. Halbouni brings a foreign image into a European city by using a classical European artistic strategy. This double-sided construct should be analyzed. Why is this new image—in this focus, the foreign image—still embedded in the Western art tradition, which itself carries the signs of the past?
