[spectre] Exhibition announcement:

[Open Space]

° never that's when...  | 26 January - 27 February 2011


       Opening: 25 January, 19.00 pm

       Project curator: Gulsen Bal

       Participating artists:

       Ursula Biemann
       Nilbar Gures
       Sinisa Ilic

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.”(1) 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.”(2) 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.

---------------------------------
(1) Jacques Rancière, Rancière Talk: Aesthetics and Politics: Rethinking the
Link at Berkeley, September 2002, p.25
(2) Simon O’Sullivan, Art Encounters – Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond
Representation, Palgrave – Macmillian, 2006, p. 88


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 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.


Nilbar Gures
Overhead, photograph, 2011

To be intricate can serve as a metaphor for Güres’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.

Gures’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.


Sinisa Ilic
Aftermath, drawings, 2009

Art is a thought in its playfulness for Sinisa Ilic. He examines closely the
transposition of things and actions derived from a dominant principle in the
postcolonial subject.

The set of drawings by Ilic 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 Ilic’s drawings we
witnesses a portrait of society; its visible environment in which we discern
the representatives of different social groups.

Marginal, video, 2009

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 Ilic 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.


supported by:

BM:UKK
Stadt Wien - Kulturabteilung MA 7

About us:
Open Friday, Saturday 13.00 - 18.30 and open for the rest of the week days
by appointment only.
Admission free

Open Space, Open Systems
Zentrum für Kunstprojekte
Lassingleithnerplatz 2
A- 1020 Vienna
Austria

(+43) 699 115 286 32

for more info: office at openspace-zkp.org

http://www.openspace-zkp.org

Open Space, Open Systems - Zentrum für Kunstprojekte aims to create the most
vital facilities for art concerned with contributing a model strategy for
cross-border and interregional projects on the basis of improving new
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