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5/5/2004

Plug in

Futura, Prague

A project by Mario Rizzi

The participating artists are:
Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Pavel Braila, Mircea Cantor, Phil Collins, Jimmie Durham, Lisa Glauer, Anna Jermolaewa, Renzo Martens, Susan Norrie, Khalil Rabah, Jalal Toufic

Assistant curator: Eva Neklyaeva

Look around: you live in a utopia of plug and play. Computer, phone, TV, even toaster – all is perfectly standardized and compatible. The possibility of plugging a thing into another thing, so that in real time they react together and they affect each other's development and status, is a much-desired goal, particularly in the computer world. The plug'n'play philosophy is not limited to new technologies. Similar models of human interaction are found in business, politics or the art world itself. The standardisation of communicative processes might enable more efficient operations, but it also eliminates diversity.

Plug in naturally takes place during the time of the Czech Republic's entrance into the E.U., presenting artists who explore subjects such as inclusion/exclusion, community, border definition, relocation, migration, and identity. The exhibition provides a space for representation of these views and offers the public a different perspective from the mainstream discourse. The eleven prominent artists in this exhibition test the boundaries and the concept of the work of art and turn upside down the relation, or better the interaction, between themselves and the viewers with a new strategy of dislocation. All the works chosen focus on the ‘human periphery' with a sense of poetry. Being a project by an artist, PLUG IN explores art curating as a specific means of artistic expression. (Mario Rizzi)

Today many curators display a thematic consistency in their work and despite the long proclaimed death of the author they are being compared more and more with authors who would demonstrate an artistic development through time, creating an oeuvre not unlike a film director, a writer or a visual artist. What is particularly engaging is that the emancipation of curating would not have happened without the artists and their concepts and strategies. What those appropriations of artistic strategies by curators have created is a closer relationship between artists and curators and often a more visible involvement of artists in curatorial practice. The artists signal that they knowingly interpolate themselves into a tradition in which individual difference arises out of strategies of reading, recognizing and transforming past models into something else and new (Jens Hoffmann).

The curators throw the ball back to the artists, utilize their works like the artists use signs. Each can see himself 'interpreted' or 'manipulated' by others, just like a musician can take up a base line from James Brown in a piece, before himself seeing this piece taken up by another musician. A contemporary criteria: the quality of the chain. In the system of art, it is no longer the position that determines the force of the individuals, but their capacity for displacement. Just like chess: the horseman will always be worth more than a bishop or a tower, which are too predictable. And there will always be too many pawns. (Nicolas Bourriaud)

Opening May 6th 6:00 – 9:00p.m.

A 80-page book on the project, published by Fine Arts Unternehmen Books, with essays by Nicolas Bourriaud, Jens Hoffmann, and Mario Rizzi is published on the occasion of the exhibition.

Futura
Holeckova 49 - 150 00
Prague

stampa

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