The asylum seeker is an uncomfortable subject but German artist Julian Rosefeldt has opened up a new line of debate with a video installation at Gateshead Baltic which challenges our views on the subject. Viv Hardwick reports.

A NINE-SCREEN video installation featuring the controversial subject of "asylum" is probably one of the best uses of Gateshead's Baltic Gallery Level Three since the J Arthur Rank-style gongs by Spain's Jaume Plensa.

The beautifully shot films by Munich contemporary artist Julian Rosefeldt show scenes like workers vacuum-cleaning stones in a cactus bed, Chinese chefs shredding polystyrene trays in a monkey enclosure, men endlessly carrying blocks of blue rubber spikes, beautiful girls cleaning bird statues...

This is the second venue in the UK to house the video installation - the first being the Frieze Fair in London - after Rosefeldt's work was first exhibited in Berlin's Art Forum two years ago. He was invited to this country by the Henry Moore Contemporary Art Foundation. Bangkok, Linz in Austria and Avignon, France, have also been tantalised by Rosefeldt's work..

"I did this project because I was quite irritated about the way the subject is treated in the media. Even on a very liberal, left-wing TV channel you will still have the same negative language and images to illustrate what's happening," he says.

"What we see just confirms the prejudices we already have. I wanted to do the opposite. In a way you can say I wanted to lie as much as you can... invent something that is absolutely fake. So it's all opaque, imaginary and surreal. If you are confronted with images you've never seen before that might show you know nothing about what is going on."

Rosefeldt feels that while Europeans might think they know about Pakistani roadside-sellers and Chinese fast-food chefs and prostitutes from Thailand, Vietnam and Brazil, they actually know very little.

"We don't know anything about their state of living or the situation which led to them living like this. There are typical stereotype, underdog jobs which we connect with certain races and nationalities," he explains.

"Each of the groups presents a clich - street cleaners, prostitutes, etc. - and I gave each a completely surreal setting which has absolutely nothing to do with their reality. I'm very open-minded about the subject because my mother works with asylum-seekers, so I have a relationship with the subject but still I don't know what they really do."

Rosefeldt's films are based on the Sisyphean rituals of life, based on the Greek myth of King Sisyphus who is punished in Hades for his misdeeds by having to eternally roll a heavy stone up a hill.

He also explores the customs of other cultures that the West doesn't understand but tends to find exotic and erotic.

"We go to these countries and hunt down these scenes with our video cameras. I do it too, I'm not judging anything here or pointing the finger. The film of the prostitutes is quite provocative and everybody has a view on this, especially about those being imported from Third World countries to work here. The film leaves us with an uncomfortably feeling because we like looking at them but we don't like the subject.

"Xenophile and xenophobia are really very close to each other. If the 'sweet-looking' street kid you filmed in Cairo came knocking at your door in Europe, would you still feel the same way about him?"

Funding for the filming, much of which was in Munich, came from car manufacturer BMW, which employs a number of asylum seekers in Germany. In one piece of film, 13 subjects are asylum seekers while the 14th is the chief engineer of BMW. "Once you dress them all alike, you can't tell which of them he is."

Journalists told Rosefeldt he couldn't put Chinese people in a monkey cage for filming, as it wouldn't be politically correct. "Well we did and we had so much fun, but the people weren't stupid at all and understood what we were doing," he says.

Bad feeling about asylum seekers mostly arises from the perception that many of them are just illegal immigrants who want to come and live in the UK because they prefer our lifestyle and want to take advantage of our benefits system.

"Of course it enters my thinking," says Rosefeldt. "But we won't resolve any problems if we only think about what to do with people once they arrive here, we have to think about why these people want to come.

"Some love us so much they want to live here, others hate us so much they want to plant bombs. But Fortress Europe is the wrong way to do it."

* Asylum runs at The Baltic until October 3.

* Thomas Florschuetz's photographic-based Are You Talking To Me? is on the Ground Floor and Level 2 until September 19.

* Archigram, a celebration of pop art and architecture from 1960s Britain, will be shown on Level 4 until October 31.