11 Jul 2014

Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen presents Dissent and Certainty

DISSENT AND CERTAINTY

Sezgin Boynik, Mihaela Brebenel & Vlad Morariu, Fokus Grupa, Freee Art Collective, Petra Gerschner, Cathleen Schuster & Marcel Dickhage
curated by Andrei Siclodi

Duration of the exhibition: June 12 – July 26, 2014
Opening hours: Tue–Fri 10am–12pm, 2pm–6pm, Sat 11am – 5pm


An exhibition in the frame of the International Fellowship Program for Art and Theory at Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen 2013–14.

The exhibition Dissent and Certainty focuses on artistic forms of resistive action against contemporary capitalist ideologies: the self-referentialism of financial capital, the overall commodification of labor and knowledge, and the growth acceleration of social injustice.

Paradoxes of the speculative in art and capital, hegemony's handling of protest and the writing of history, current forms of institutional critique in art, and issues of political formation and self-management through conceptual art practices provide a matrix of content, in which each of the six participating positions is able to develop his/her discourse. 'Dissent' and 'certainty' are not understood here as fixed poles of a dialectic argumentation but as dynamic concepts used to characterise a schizophrenic mood that seems typical of the current social construction of reality.

The exhibition Dissent and Certainty is the result of the involvement with the projects, artistic ideas and working methods of the participants in the International Fellowship Program for Art and Theory at Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen 2013–14. Its starting point is their artistic approaches, fields of investigation, and overall themes. The curatorial concept envisaged the step-by-step development of the exhibition's theme and its display parallel to progress in the projects of the artists involved:

Starting from the premise that linguistic postulates are constitutive components of the majority of conceptual art and art theory, in Büchsenhausen Sezgin Boynik continued his work with the relationship between art and slogans in artistic as well as political discourse. The project politics of the public body by Petra Gerschner posed questions about the relations of subject, body and power in the course of global protest movements. Her investigation focused on 'the return of the physical presence of the body as a collective gathering on the streets and squares of the world.' Vlad Morariu's theory-based investigation Parerga: the Politics of Framing in the Current Discourse of Institutional Critique asked about the way in which current practices of institutional critique address questions of 'framing' in the sense of Jacques Derrida (in his book The Truth in Painting). Is there a 'criticality of framing' (both physical as well as conceptual) and if so, how does this relate to the heritage of historical institutional critique? Finally, in their current series of works about the paradox of the speculative, the artist duo Cathleen Schuster and Marcel Dickhage are interested in how the reproducibility of speculation can be achieved, and to what extent it is possible to bring about an artistic opening of the concept for (re-)appropriation.

The five fellowship holders are joined in the exhibition by two additional positions invited by Vlad Morariu, whose contributions disclose a differentiated perspective on contemporary practices of institutional critique: the Croatian duo Fokus Grupa and the British art collective Freee. Fokus Grupa is an art collective from Rijeka, Croatia, which practices interdisciplinary work between art, design and curating. Their artistic strategies take on political forms but without aiming to be a representation of 'political art'. Freee is a collective of artists who work together on slogans, billboards and publications that challenge the commercial and bureaucratic colonization of the public sphere of opinion formation. Freee occupies the public sphere with works that take sides, speak their mind and divide opinion.

For a productive handling of the schizophrenic mood described above, the reference to historic moments or historical construction processes whose (critical) observations are meaningful to the present (or which could become meaningful) prove to be helpful. All participants of the exhibition thus refer to this in one way or another.

For additional information on the exhibition please visit the website buchsenhausen.at.