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30/5/2003

Into the Breach

Smart Project Space, Amsterdam

Work by: Marc Bijl | Phil Collins | Banu Cennetoglu & Bojan Fajfric | Marcel Dinahet | Smith/Stewart | Siebren Versteeg | with performance by Fabienne Audéoud at 22hrs in SMART Cinema

Opening Reception Saturday 31st May, 21:00h

"A painful thought: past a certain point in time, history has not been real. Without realising it, the whole human race seems to have suddenly left reality behind. Everything that is supposed to have happened since then would no longer be true, but we wouldn't realise it. Our task and our duty would now be to uncover this point, and until we did we would have to persist in our present destruction." CANETTI

In this sense we are all hostages, serving as dissuasive arguments and collectively answering for something, but for what? This is a kind of fate that is fixed and whose manipulators we can no longer even see. We now live in a state of permanent suspense and emergency, not knowing what event, what accident will set off the ultimate manipulation. It is from a no-man's land of terror that the world is now managed. Liberty, security, terror; we have successively breached these stages in every domain. The world is held collectively responsible for the order that reigns there - if anything were to come dangerously close to infringing this order, the world would have to be destroyed. The era of the trans-political is beginning. With this we are in breach of our own identity, called upon to assume it, to answer for it with our own lives.

We now accept that the world started from nothing and it will end with nothing and that it is going through enormous transformations that involve its own destruction. Culture so far has been an attempt to escape the realization that we are finite. Culture was the idea that we have these monuments forever, like an illusion of infinity. Every great burst of art has been the attempt to think that we have made it, that we have achieved the absolute, in books, in philosophy, in art. And we have created a shield against that through our culture. Today we are now realizing that it may be over. Canetti wished to seize this blind point beyond which "things have stopped being true", where history has stopped existing without our realizing it - without which realization we can only persevere in our current destruction. Supposing we could determine this point, what would we do? The point from which we could turn the process of the dispersion of time and history around escapes us. This is why we call on every previous epoch, every way of life, every mentality to historicize itself, to recount itself with proof and documents in hand: it is because we feel that all this has been invalidated in our own sphere, which is that of the end of history.

Every Sunday and Wednesday at 17.00 hrs Smart Project Space presents free video programs in SMART Cinema. "A Certain Dislocation" accompanies the exhibition Into the Breach.

Sponsored by: Gemeente Amsterdam, Mentrum, Mondriaan Stichting, Brand Bier, Beam Systems, Van der Pol Bouwmaterialen Work by Smith/Stewart originally commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella in association with Chisenhale Gallery, London.

For further information please contact Jacco Musper, tel +31 20 427 5951 or jacco@smartprojectspace.net

SMART Project Space
Exhibition Space & Cinema: 1e Const. Huygensstraat 20
Opening times: Tues-Sat from 12.00-22.00, Sun from 14.00-22.00 hrs.
Mail to: P.O.Box 15004, NL-1001 MA Amsterdam
Phone: +31 20 427.5951 Fax.: +31 20 427.5953

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