° never that's when... | 26 January - 27 February 2011<br><br><br> Opening: 25 January, 19.00 pm<br><br> Project curator: Gulsen Bal<br><br> Participating artists: <br><br> Ursula Biemann<br> Nilbar Gures<br>
Sinisa Ilic <br><br>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?<br>
<br>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. <br>
<br>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?<br>
<br>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 ... <br>
<br>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. <br>
<br>---------------------------------<br>(1) Jacques Rancière, Rancière Talk: Aesthetics and Politics: Rethinking the Link at Berkeley, September 2002, p.25<br>(2) Simon O’Sullivan, Art Encounters – Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation, Palgrave – Macmillian, 2006, p. 88<br>
<br><br>Artist info:<br><br><br>Ursula Biemann<br>X-Mission, video essay, single channel, 40', 2008<br><br>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. <br>
<br>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.<br>
<br>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.<br>
<br><br>Nilbar Gures<br>Overhead, photograph, 2011<br><br>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. <br>
<br>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. <br>
<br>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.<br><br><br>Sinisa Ilic <br>
Aftermath, drawings, 2009<br><br>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.<br><br>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. <br>
<br>Marginal, video, 2009<br><br>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. <br>
<br>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. <br>
<br><br>supported by:<br><br>BM:UKK <br>Stadt Wien - Kulturabteilung MA 7<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><br>Open Space, Open Systems <br>
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