° <b>It's the Political Economy, Stupid</b> | 16 March - 25 April 2011<br><br>Opening: 15 March, 19.00 pm<br><br><b>Project curators</b>: Oliver Ressler & Gregory Sholette<br><br><b>Participating artists</b>: <br><br>
Zanny Begg <br>Libia Castro & Ólafur Ólafsson <br>Damon Rich <br>Superflex <br><br><br>Globalization, privatization, flexible work schedules, deregulated markets; 30 years of neoliberal capitalism has driven most of the world’s governments to partly or wholly abandon their previous role as arbitrators between the security of the majority and the profiteering of the corporate sector. It comes as no surprise therefore that when problems in the US real estate and financial sectors resulted in a global financial crisis starting in 2008, governments all over the world pumped trillions of dollars into banks and insurance companies, essentially creating the largest transfer ever of capital into the private sector. One argument often cited for this unprecedented action was that many of these transnational corporations were “too big to fail.” Still, despite these enormous expenditures millions of people soon lost their homes and livelihood, and the economic and social damage has not yet ended. The cost of these bailouts is staggering. States borrowed capital to rescue financial institutions resulting in growing national debt and virtual insolvency for some countries. Managing these budget deficits might have been possible if wealthy transnational corporations were forced to assist the economy, but neoliberal governments instead chose to introduce belt-tightening programs that radically reduce public services and social welfare. Needless to say, these austerity measures do not necessarily reflect the will of the majority, and increasing voter apathy is one serious side effect of such top-down decision-making.<br>
<br>Today, we are facing a catastrophe of capitalism that has also become a major crisis for representative democracy. The very idea of the modern nation state is in jeopardy as the deterritorialized flow of finance capital melts down all that was solid into raw material for market speculation and bio-political asset mining. It is the social order itself, and the very notion of governance with its archaic promise of security and happiness that has become another kind of modern ruin. Theorist Slavoj Žižek puts it this way, “the central task of the ruling ideology in the present crises is to impose a narrative which will place the blame for the meltdown not on the global capitalist system as such, but on secondary and contingent deviations (overly lax legal regulations, the corruption of big financial institutions, and so on).” [1]<br>
<b><br>It’s the Political Economy, Stupid</b> [2] brings together a group of superlative artists who focus on the current crisis in a sustained and critical manner. Rather than acquiesce to our current calamity this exhibition asks if it is not time to push back against the disciplinary dictates of the capitalist logic and, as if by some artistic sorcery, launch a rescue of the very notion of the social itself.<br>
<br>The exhibition <b>It’s the Political Economy, Stupid</b> will be continued with different works in an upcoming show at the Austrian Cultural Forum New York, from January till April 2012 (<a href="http://www.acfny.org">http://www.acfny.org</a>).<br>
<br>----------------------------------------------------------<br>[1] Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. Verso Books, London/New York 2009, p. 19<br>[2] The title It’s the Political Economy, Stupid is a re-phrasing by Slavoj Žižek of the phrase “It’s the economy, stupid”, a widely circulated phrase used during Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 presidential campaign against incumbent President George Bush Senior.<br>
<br><br><b>Artist info:<br><br>Zanny Begg </b><br>Treat (or trick), video installation, 7 min., 2009<br><br>Treat (or trick) is a video installation in three parts exploring the tricks of the financial trade; part 1 stars the notorious magician of the free market, Mr. Invisible Hands; part 2 explores the secret life of rabbits (and other small commodities); and part 3 looks at the bottomless pit of our desires. Canned laughter, boos, gasps and cheers evoke an absent audience who jolly along the solitary viewer in accepting some of the oldest myths of the free market. But as the film points out Mr. Invisible Hand’s best trick is not pulling a rabbit from a hat or acts of escapology and transposition but changing the relationship between audience and performer – no one really believes in the magic, but we still come along to see the “allure of the trick”.<br>
<br><b>Libia Castro & Ólafur Ólafsson</b><br>Lobbyists, video, 16 min., 2009 <br><br>With this video work we wanted to continue portraying labour today and a possible example of immaterial labour, as well as portraying an activity that would represent latest developments in Europe on certain policies. We registered lobbyists and activists performing under working conditions, exploring the maelstrom surrounding their activity in Brussels and Strasbourg. In preparation for the work we studied historical and contemporary sources constructing the figure of the lobbyist, interviewed and filmed a variety of people associated with lobbyist associations, NGOs and civilian ‘watchdog’ groups, and dug into different modes of registration, news and music videos. We commissioned British reporter and activist Tamasin Cave to write an article about the current situation, which we were witnessing. In the following we worked with British actress Caroline Dalton and the Icelandic reggae group Hjálmar to perform the article, in an intertwining manner of spoken narration, singing and chanting, to a dub-score from Hjálmar, as soundtrack to the video.<br>
<br><b>Damon Rich</b><br>Mortgage Stakeholders, 2-channel video, 47 min., 2008<br><br>Mortgage Stakeholders stages a conversation between bankers, regulators, architects, investors, financial justice advocates and others about the United States system for financing private housing. This video was originally produced as part of Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center, a mobile exhibition kit of models, photographs, videos, and drawings designed to immerse visitors in the financial landscape of architecture.<br>
<br>The American preference for traditional residential design masks a frightening reality: across the globe, individual buildings have been retrofitted to serve as interchangeable nodes in a vast abstract structure, held loosely together by legal and political restraints, made to allow the furious circulation of finance capital.<br>
<br>Who supplies the money to construct and buy buildings? What are the historical relationships between lenders and borrowers? How are ownership claims produced and circulated? As what has become known as the Subprime Meltdown continues to spread, pushing people out of homes, wasting neighborhoods, bankrupting institutions, and threatening global economic crisis, Red Lines aims to broaden and enrich the urgent conversation about how our society finances its living environments.<br>
<br><b>Superflex</b><br>The Financial Crisis, video installation, 2009<br><br>The Financial Crisis (Session I-V) is a new film work, in which Superflex address the financial crisis and meltdown from a therapeutic perspective. A hypnotist guides us through our worst nightmares to reveal the crisis without as the psychosis within. During 4 sessions you will experience the fascination of speculation and power, fear, anxiety and frustration of loosing control, economic loss and personal disaster.<br>
<br>Session 1 - The Invisible Hand<br>Session 2 - George Soros<br>Session 3 - You<br>Session 4 - Old Friends<br><br>A middle-aged man in wire-rimmed glasses coolly asks us to imagine various scenarios relating to personal ruin: losing your house, losing your job. He asks us to picture what it must be like to be billionaire financier George Soros as he’s guided in his various investment machinations by the invisible hand of the market. It all sounds vaguely unreal and nightmarish, and sure enough, at the end of each “session”, the man snaps his fingers and says, “When you wake up, you will feel happy and refreshed”. It turns out he’s a hypnotist, and we are being put under to cure our addiction to capitalism – which, unlike smoking, is one habit that seems impossible to break. (Time Out New York, Feb. 2010)<br>
<br><br><b>supported by</b>:<br><br>BM:UKK <br>Stadt Wien - Kulturabteilung MA 7<br>ERSTE Foundation<br><br>About us:<br>Open Friday, Saturday 13.00 - 18.30 and open for the rest of the week days by appointment only. <br>
Admission free <br><b><br>Open Space, Open Systems </b><br>Zentrum für Kunstprojekte<br>Lassingleithnerplatz 2<br>A- 1020 Vienna<br>Austria<br><br>(+43) 699 115 286 32<br><br>for more info: <a href="mailto:office@openspace-zkp.org">office@openspace-zkp.org</a> <br>
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