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13/6/2008

Like an Attali Report, but different

Kadist Art Foundation, Paris

Yael Bartana, Gregg Bordowitz, Heman Chong, Ciprian Muresan, Deimantas Narkevicius, Redza Piyadasa, Pushwagner, Anatoli Osmolovsky, Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor

Curated by Cosmin Costinas

The Attali Report (or the Report of the Commission for the Liberation of French Growth), commissioned by President Sarkozy, was published half a year ago, provoking a long series of discussions, mainly confined to the French public arena and mainly focused on the report's concrete proposals, set to implement a neoliberal model for the French economy and society. But the Attali Report is a surprisingly interesting text, especially in its emphatic high brow literary introduction, being one of the first major instances where the neoliberal system is asserted beyond the rather discreet discourse of the "necessary reforms" through which it has insinuated itself since the eighties. It is now invested with the value of a concrete historical paradigm, of a describable era of revolutionary novelty, making the Attali Report a relevant document for the current attempts to imagine a dominant narrative representing and organizing the scope of our global system.

However, this exhibition is neither about the Attali Report nor is it a report itself. It does, nonetheless, try to unfold fictions and images that offer an insight on different narratives that have been overlapping for the past decades in our thinking of politics, at different times and in different localities. It refers to the disintegration of the communist utopia and some images, passions, stories and reactions that came along with this process; it visits the meeting of fiction and Utopian thinking on both sides of the Iron Curtain; it mentions some processes of exoticization and nation building; it acknowledges the formation of communities of struggle and resistance. But the works don't passively present such narratives, they alter them and participate - albeit indirectly - to their fabrication. The exhibition works at this point of interaction between story telling and political imagination, a knot that encapsulates the political potential of art as an agent of representation. It brings together these occurrences and positions, sometimes contradictory, sometimes doubtful and sometimes passionately engaged and determined.

The reference to the Attali report on the state of France, a highly specific and local anchor, is used to take the discussion into a wider perspective, to mark the moments and the blockages - as well as some parallel areas of articulation - that have contributed to the current crisis in the imagination of a language and a scope for politics.

The exhibition is accompanied by interventions of writers and critics and by a film program that reiterates a few lines of the exhibition, using the cinematic language and its potentials.

Image: Pushwagner, Detail from "Klaxton", 1990 acrylic on canvas, private collection (Oslo)

Opening on Saturday, June 14

Accompanying program

Saturday, June 14, 11am
Interventions by Sven Luetticken and Simon Sheikh.

Saturday, June 14, 1pm
Screening of the film “Fast Trip, Long Drop” (1994) by Gregg Bordowitz, with an introduction by
the artist.

Friday, June 20, 8pm
“Agitators” (1971) by Dezso Magyar.
“Family Nest” (1979) by Bela Tarr.

Sunday, June 22, 8pm
“I am Cuba” (1964) by Mikhail Kalatozov.

Tuesday, June 25, 8pm
“Out of the Present” (1995) by Andrei Ujica.

The film program and the talks will take place at the cinema Ciné 13, located in the vicinity of Kadist
Art Foundation.

Ciné 13
1 ave Junot F-75018 Paris Phone : +33 1 42 51 13 79
http://www.cine13-theatre.com

The exhibition is generously supported by Plan B, Cluj; OCA - Office for Contemporary Art Norway, Oslo; Royal Danish Embassy in Paris; Lithuanian Institute, Vilnius.

Kadist Art Foundation
19bis-21 rue des Trois Frères F-75018 Paris
Opening hours
Thursday – Sunday, 2pm to 7pm

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