Announcement: Is this all there is?

° Is this all there is? | 18 November - 15 December 2011

Opening: 17 November, 19.00 pm

Project curators: Gülsen Bal and Alenka Gregori?

Participating artists:

Guy Ben-Ner
Ibro Hasanovi?
IRWIN
Milica Tomi?

Round table talk/discussion: No(W)Here by Nermin Sayba??l?
19 November, 17.00

Location: Open Space, Open Systems

Additional publication will accompany the project in an Intellect publication, UK.
A special issue: Is this all there is? (coming out in December 2011)
Journal of Visual Art Practice
Editor: Christopher Smith
Guest Editor: Gülsen Bal
Guest Co-Editor: Alenka Gregori?

How can we link the idea that is related with the issue of sovereignty and territorial integrity that traces the non-alignment movement initiated in 1955 with today’s society? So, how can we read the historical roots of non-alignment? How can we escape from being always placed in either East or West or/and North or South without having any influence on basic fact of place of birth? How can one stop this ever going process? We cannot ignore basic facts but we can decide that we don’t want to be faced with an accomplished fact. Can we start to act non-aligned… not being anywhere but being everywhere?

Here there is a need to turn to the “East reading East” coded analyses with the hope to reveal the problematic that arises in its immediate effects on political praxis. For that reason this project aims to create new concepts in its reference to the “new liminal practices, [which] open up the social field to the possibility of manifold instantiations [...] and thereby ensure the proximity of the creation of values and the production of subjectivity [...] between being as difference and subjectivity as processual and transient actualisation”. How, then, is it possible to move beyond the realm of representation in which the relations of agency to the admission of indeterminacy are conceived?

Artist info:

Guy Ben-Ner
Stealing Beauty, Video, 2008
Courtesy of the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie (Düsseldorf)

Stealing Beauty was shot without permission at numerous IKEA stores around New York, Berlin and Tel Aviv. In the movie the Ben-Ner’s quite naturally inhabit idealized showroom interiors with price tags dangling from furniture, and shoppers occasionally interrupting the family's daily routines. Because of the hit-and-run filming, the traditional cinematic continuity is abandoned and the changing sets are stand-ins for their home. The narrative, however, remains linear as the father offers life lessons on the subjects of economic exchange, meaning of private property, ethics, and family love eventually leading to the children's rebellious manifesto.
His very process - using Ikea room models (in stores in Israel, Germany and the US) as a ready-made for his loosely scripted sitcom, stealing footage before he is chased out - tells us everything about his relation to free trade and international mega-corporations.

Ibro Hasanovi?
Attempt of being..., Video, 2006

In the video work Attempt of being, Hasanovi? sits in a grass field and spontaneously reads Sidonie – Gabrielle Colette's book L’Ingénue libertine (The Gentle Libertine, 1909.) in French, language that he did not speak at the time; trying to create the platform that questions the idea of possible.

IRWIN
Principle of Organization and Action/ The Neue Slowenische Kunst collective (NSK) Chart, 1984/2005
Lambda print, 157 x 203 cm
Courtesy of Kontakt. The Art Collection of Erste Group

The Neue Slowenische Kunst collective (NSK) was formed by three founding groups – Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre, Irwin and Laibach – back in 1984, still within the framework of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Collaboration, a free flow of ideas among individual members and groups, a declarative copyleft, which was not limited even by the indication of authorship, as well as mutual assistance and joint planning of particular moves and actions were key for the development and operation of NSK, although the groups were autonomous in their activities. Awareness of the specific conditions for operation in the field of art in the then Yugoslavia, which was largely defined by the closedness of the art system and a valorization system adjusted to local needs, led to a concentration of critical mass and confrontation with the art system. The antagonism generated in this way, as a consequence, clearly delineated the contours of and subjectivized particular groups and NSK as a whole. Self-evidently, in conditions of strained relationships, the responsibility for art production and its reflection lay solely with us, and it was precisely through steering this confrontation that we established our autonomy. In short, collaboration and common wealth were the basis and the inevitable consequence of Neue Slowenische Kunst’s positioning in relation to the cultural and political reality of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
NSK was formed by three founding groups, concretely by members of this three groups. They confirmed the foundation of NSK by voting and simultaneously agreed upon it’s organizational chart. This is one of few elements in which Noue Slowenische Kunst is objectified, not because it is properly represented by it but because NSK was formed through it.

Milica Tomi?
Black on White: Refracting the whiteness of the whites, 2011
Mixed media installtion

Late ‘50s, Oskar Davi?o, who was a surrealist writer, poet and linguistic genius, as every surrealist worthy of that name must be visited in a occasion of a non-aligned movement "preparation" a certain African country, wherehe spoke to men of letters, politicians, shaman and ordinary people as their guest. He commuted himself sometimes with the help of an interpreter and sometimes in his second mother tongue, French, which was also the colonial language of his hosts’ country. He wrote a book about it called Crno na belo (1963) – literally translated “Black on White”, a Serbo-Croatian syntagm to which the English phrase “in black and white” comes closest, which demands: speak the truth! or testify to the truth! But it also means that the truth is written on a paper, becoming an evidence, a document. The book was a travelogue dealing with the contemporaneous African post-colonial societies.
This work tries to analyze a passage where Oskar Davi?o tells us about the truck journey where a vivid discussion on development of political life in Africa takes place. It is a request to testify and tell the truth about the complex situation of anti-colonial politics, disassembling and decomponizing the WHITE COLOR into the colors of the political parties and organizations and their presence at that time in Africa.

supported by:

bm:ukk
MA 7 - Interkulturelle und Internationale Aktivitäten
ERSTE Foundation

kind support provided by:

cyberlab Digitale Entwicklungen GmbH

In collaboration with the VIENNA ART WEEK

About us:
Open Friday, Saturday 13.00 - 18.30 and open for the rest of the week days by appointment only.
Admission free

Open Space, Open Systems
Zentrum für Kunstprojekte
Lassingleithnerplatz 2
A- 1020 Vienna
Austria

(+43) 699 115 286 32

for more info: office@openspace-zkp.org

http://www.openspace-zkp.org

Open Space, Open Systems - Zentrum für Kunstprojekte aims to create the most vital facilities for art concerned with contributing a model strategy for cross-border and interregional projects on the basis of improving improving new approach.