12 Feb 2014

The Barn Oxford: Total Potemkin

Exhibition Total Potemkin: Marc Adrian and Ben G. Fodor

The exhibition in cooperation with ZKM (Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe), curated by Laura Carlotta Gottlob, presents two European Artists:

Marc Adrian (1931 – 2008) who was an early pioneer in Op Art, programmed art — also using computers as early as 1967 —and avantgarde filming. In 1968, he participated in the legendary ICA show 'Cybernetic Serendipity' in London, and three years earlier in the equally legendary MoMa exhibition 'The Responsive Eye'. Before he was even fourteen, Adrian was called up to the Wehrmacht and experienced the last months of the war on the western front. 'The rebellion against authority, against the law of the father, and against repression is celebrated in various forms of liberation: of the picture, the body, eroticism, the senses and the subject.', writes Peter Weibel, Director of the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe.
A number of Adrian's experimental films (Total, Schriftfilm I, Orange, Blue Movie, Rock) will be presented.


Ben G. Fodor, based in Vienna, raised in Hungary, will present work contained in his long lasting project 'Incipit Vita Nova'. It deals with an essential contemporary theme: the role of utopias. 'Incipit Vita Nova' grapples with the issue of new idealistic orientations, starting with the 'old', in some cases failed 20th-century utopias as manifested in structures and monuments. Semi-fictional architectural models correspond to photographic works and drawings on plasterwork, which resemble archaeological finds.
For the first time, connections between 'left' and 'right' totalitarianisms of the past and current excesses of the 'plutocracy' are extensively articulated in an artistic format.
'Fodor's work has its place in the international genealogy of important artists who, over the past ten years, have repeatedly tackled motifs relating to the interplay of ideology, architecture, and buried utopias', writes Georg Schöllhammer, curator of Manifesta 2010 (among other exhibitions), and editor of the documenta 12 magazines.
'Fodor does not succumb to the ideological sentimentality of a lost paradigm that has to be recovered – and that is what makes his work so exciting. Nor does he succumb – as others do – to the fascination of an architectural language, whether it be that of modernism or classicistic fascism. It seems that, for him, it is rather a matter of discovering the moments of demolition, of deconstruction, and of the archaeological fragmentation, as it were, of these utopias.'