Never that's when...
dal 24/1/2011 al 26/2/2011
Segnalato da
24/1/2011
Never that's when...
Open Space - Zentrum fur Kunstprojekte, Wien
The exhibition aims to engage with the issue of informal practices and political subjects where the question of the political opens within the creative practice which disturbs the true, in-itself status of the condition. Each participating artist -Ursula Biemann, Nilbar Gures, Sinisa Ilic - was invited to present art practices that set new kinds of creative connections in its wider context in the articulation of informal practices or the formulation of 'yet-to-come' politics.
Project curator: Gülsen Bal
The exhibition never that's when... aims to engage with the issue of informal practices and
political subjects where the question of the political opens within the creative practice which
disturbs the true, in-itself status of the condition. This also brings up a question, a question that I
quite often ask: what are the elements that traverse art and its politics? Likewise, how can one
tackle the issue of engaging in explicitly social forms of art making that is signalling „not-yet-
formalized‟ politics? More than that, how to locate the informal political dimension in the subject?
And that frame, the place where one takes a stand, is prevailing new capacity of resistance and
of the alternative. However, in rethinking the link Rancière‟s approach offers a point rendering
“just as art becomes aware of the limits of its power, it is pushed toward a new political
commitment by the weakening of politics itself.” This provokes a general shift from critical art to
what forms a new idea of “art in our life.” I believe this also brings us to a more elementary base
towards claiming a place in between “working politically” and “being political”, despite instigating
different politics, as to create different articulating forms to articulation.
No need to state the obvious, yet it is hard to explore the relations between critical engagement
and active politics in its transformative modalities relevant to creative practice today; in the way
this space defines a search for present and future production. However “the importance in
understanding politics, as well as political art practices, [...] as involving the active production of
our own subjectivity” taken together as “subjectivity itself (is) a political field.” The question for
me, then, centred on the very fact that what is it that is happening in this quest?
Such connections nevertheless appear to address the flip side of their impossibility, which forces
creative practice to go beyond itself into something else. This engagement entails addressing
the processual intensities, which reveals its transformative capacities as a space for possibilities
mediated by relational models demonstrating how these could lead “to a recreation and a
reinvention of the subject itself” by uneasy relations and interdependencies of forces to generate
in the eventualities of never that's when ...
Each participating artist in this exhibition never that's when... was invited to present art practices
that set new kinds of creative connections in its wider context in the articulation of informal
practices or the formulation of „yet-to-come‟ politics.
Artist info:
Ursula Biemann
X-Mission, video essay, single channel, 40', 2008
X-Mission explores the logic of the refugee camp
as one of the oldest extraterritorial zones. Taking
the Palestinian refugee camps as a case in point,
the video engages with the different discourses –
legal, symbolic, urban, mythological, and
historical – that give meaning to this exceptional
space. According to International Law, the
Palestinian refugee represents indeed the
exception within the exception.
In the course of 60 years they had to build a civil
life in the camps, fostering an intense microcosm
with complex relations to homeland and
Diaspora.
The refugee camp harbours an intense
microcosm with complex relations to homeland
production still
and to related communities abroad. Given the
vital connections among the separated
Palestinian populations, the video attempts to
place the Palestinian refugee in the context of a
global Diaspora and considers post-national
models of belonging which have emerged through the networked matrix of this widely dispersed
community. Special case studies include the reconstruction of Nahr el-Bared refugee camp in
Lebanon and the entanglement between the Qualified Industrial Zone in Jordan recruiting its
labour force from China and India and the among Palestinian refugees of a nearby camp.
The narrative relies on a series of interviews made with experts (lawyer, journalist, architect,
anthropologist, historian) interspersed with multiple-layer video montage deriving from both
downloaded and self-recorded sources. Speakers include Susan Akram, Bilal Khabeiz, Samar
Kanafani, Ismaël Sheikh Hassan, Oroub elAbed, Beshara Doumani. The video also reflects on
the fine distinctions between humanitarian and artistic missions.
Short bio:
Ursula Biemann is an artist, theorist and curator who has in recent years produced a considerable
body of work on migration, mobility, technology and gender. Biemann's practice has long included
discussions with academics and other practitioners; she has worked with anthropologists, cultural
theorists, NGO members, architects, as well as scholars of sonic culture. Her video essays reach
a wide and diverse audience through festival screenings, art exhibitions, activist conferences,
networks and educational settings.
Recent exhibitions include: Zona B at Tapies Foundation, Barcelona; International Biennial
Istanbul; Centre d'art Contemporain, Geneva, solo exhibitions at the Bildmuseet Umea in
Sweden, Nikolaj Contemporary Art in Copenhagen and the Helmhaus Zurich, a retrospective at
the film festivals FID Marseille and TEK Rome, as well as participation in major exhibitions at the
Arnolfini, Bristol, A Foundation Liverpool; LACE, Los Angeles and the Art Institute, San Francisco;
Artist Space, New York, Kunstverein Hamburg;the Gwangju, Shanghai and Sevilla Biennials,
steirischer Herbst, Graz, Flaherty Film Seminars, NY and many others.
http://www.geobodies.org
Nilbar Güreş
Overhead, photograph, 2011
To be intricate can serve as a metaphor for Güreş‟s practice as
she sees her work as series of non-linear plural constructions
leading to unstrained kernels of consciousness. Her multi-
disciplinary practice allows mapping out issues in reference to
“situational representation” and the possibilities of their
transformative potentials for the self-aware contradictions and
blurring of boundaries. Her work mirrors today‟s excessively
mediated culture and society while it deconstructs ontological
priority in that cultural engagement that is produced
performatively.
Güreş‟s work Overhead creates a confrontation that forces one
to focus on what generates the “production of the subject,” in
which process and becoming, intervention and creativity are
privileged. Yet these issues favour analyzing specific situations
through a wide range of their cross-references, mostly derived
from her home country, Turkey. What we witness here is a new
entry that brings us face to face with the constructs of gender-
specific positioning marked with the issues of intrinsic
normalization.
This new photographic work, Overhead, also provides the
backdrop of processes of micro-political force of change
expressed in a predicated conflict and negotiation within cultural
specific conditions.
Short bio:
Nilbar Güreş born in Istanbul, lives and works in Vienna and Istanbul. Nilbar‟s practice deals with
the representation of female sexuality, by challenging the everyday enforcement of femininity and
its request for well-mannered adherence to a set of structured behavioural rules and
beautification procedures. She studied painting at the Faculty of Arts, Marmara University,
Istanbul, and holds a Masters degree in Painting & Graphics from the Academy of Fine Arts
Vienna.
Recent exhibitions include: Ex Territory (Tel Aviv, 2010), Tactics of Invisibility (TBA 21, Vienna /
Tanas Berlin, 2010), Where do we go from here? (Secession, Vienna, 2010), 6th Berlin Biennial
(Secession, Vienna, 2010), Starter (Arter, Istanbul, 2010), Curated by (Ernst Hilger Gallery,
Vienna, 2010), Not a Lens but a Prism (Eugenio de Almeida Foundation, 2010),The Others
(Museo d‟Arte Contemporanea della Sicilia, 2010), White Out (Kunsthaus Erfurt, 2010),
Performance and Gender, Politik, soziale Fragen und Intercultural Studies (Fotogalerie, 2009),
What Keeps Mankind Alive? (11th International Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, 2009).
http://nilbargures.com
Siniša Ilić
Aftermath, drawings, 2009
Art is a thought in its playfulness for Siniša Ilić. He
examines closely the transposition of things and
actions derived from a dominant principle in the
postcolonial subject.
The set of drawings by Ilić titled Aftermath – the
content of which, according to the artist‟s statement,
is “post-explicit” because it re-presents the “crumbs”
of an event “evacuated” from the field of vision – is
an example of productive denaturalization by which
the picture, through a kind of analytical diversion,
suspends the event of violence by deconstructing it
into fragmentary remains scattered across a
macabre white space. When violence, by likewise
“violent” operation of denaturalization, has been
divorced from the dramaticism of a specific blow
and thrown into the white chasm of “overstepped signs” of the regime of an art image, it no longer
produces shock-effects but consequences that, specifically here, reveal it as an offshoot of
circulation of social conflicts, and not as singular and individually motivated incidents. In Ilić‟s
drawings we witnesses a portrait of society; its visible environment in which we discern the
representatives of different social groups.
Marginal is a video work whose “essence” is
elusive. Instead of the meaning or the story,
the pictures are engendering
unpleasantness. The picture or the moving
picture and the people that can be discerned
are faceless or expressionless; the pictures
are moving and disappearing. We can only
discern the traces of the bodies, which reach
us late or come just to promise the
forthcoming events.
The characters and their identity are
unimportant as well as the sequence of
events. The material that Ilić use is
documentary and chronicles the time
between other two events which are of
significance to him. Everything is a blur. No
expression. The sub-plots make the scene.
Short bio:
Siniša Ilić works and lives in Belgrade. Ilić, artist and performer, deconstructs violence (from
heteronormative to nationalistic) and is a connector between different spaces within the realm of
culture, art and activism. He is interested in conceptualising the possibility of rethinking financial
capitalism and its financialization processes that permeate art, the social, the political and the
critical discourses. This reveals the process of the continuous re-articulation of our own position
in the world we live in and work.
His entire artistic work was always strongly oriented towards team or group work; no matter if it
was a workshop type of work or artistic projects (collaborations with writers and theoreticians in
my visual art projects and comics, people from theatre and performance fields). He is co-founder
and member of TkH (Walking Theory), Belgrade, independent performance art and theory
platform, and as well of TkH magazine.
Recent exhibitions include: No ifs. No Buts, DEPO, Istanbul 2010; “The Uncomparables. Forming
a Suspicious State”, Nova gallery, Zagreb 2010; “Aftermath”, Salon of Museum of Contemporary
Arts, Belgrade, 2009; “I am What I am”, Cacak, Serbia 2010; “The Law of Capital: Histories of
Oppression”, Ljubljana, Slovenia 2009, “Dear Countrymen and Woman”, Gallery MC, New York
City, USA, 2009, “Salon of Revolution”, HDLU, Zagreb, Croatia, 2008, “Beyond Theory”, WUK
Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna, and SUSHI Gallery, San Diego, USA, 2008.
http://sinisailic.blogspot.com
supported by:
BM:UKK
Stadt Wien - Kulturabteilung MA 7
Image: Ursula Biemann
Opening: 25 January, 19.00 pm
Open Space, Open Systems - Zentrum für Kunstprojekte
Lassingleithnerplatz 2. A- 1020 Vienna
Open Friday, Saturday 13.00 - 18.30 and open for the rest of the week days by appointment only.
Admission free