The World is Not Fair

Toshiki Okada, "Unable to see" , 2012.

The architecture collective raumlaborberlin in cooperation with the theatre venue Hebbel am Ufer presents The World is Not Fair:

"These pavilions are not to be understood as state agents for national branding, but instead as places of highly subjective artistic and political reflection. Beyond the boundaries of cultural disciplines, architects, theater artists, performers, and visual artists will seek to examine ideas, systems, and phenomena by which even the most outlying cultures are now globally connected with each other. What will be exhibited is not the world as it is or should be, but how we perceive, understand, and interpret it. Can it still be represented and negotiated as a totality at all? "

One of the proposals:

"In an architectural structure reminiscent of the damaged reactor blocks in Fukushima, the director Toshiki Okada, who comes from Yokohama, together with his theater troupe chelfitsch, will examine the abstraction and immeasurability of the catastrophic events in a language of reduced gestures and limited words. "

More on Raumlaborberlin:

"Raumlaborberlin has been working at the boundaries of architecture, art, and urbanism since 1999. Strategies for urban restructuring are examined in interdisciplinary working teams. As opposed to a city of inclusion and exclusion, Raumlabor is on the lookout for a city of possibilities. In terms of its practice, architecture is a labor for experimental, collaborative, passionate action in urban space. Construction is thus not so much to be understood as working on an object, but as developing a narrative that becomes part of a place. "

Beyond What Was Contemporary Art

Starting today@Secession, Vienna:

If we imagine Contemporary Art to be a historical period that emerged from 1989 in parallel to other hegemonic formations such as global neoliberalism, could it be argued that, in sync with the current seismic shifts in society, politics, and economy, it has now reached a dead end? Is Contemporary Art—art in and of the epoch of neoliberalism—on its way out, together with the system that made it possible? What kind of challenges and possibilities might then lie before us in the space of art in times when “business as usual” is no longer an option? Can we speculate collectively on how to move beyond the present confines of Contemporary Art’s normalized and normalizing practices, and articulate what can appear from Contemporary Art’s “formerness?”

Aérea Negrot

Zarina Bhimji: Out of Blue

“This project is about learning to listen to “difference” , the difference in shadows, microcosmos and sensitivity to difference in its various forms. Listening with the eyes, listening to changes in tone, difference of colour. It attempts to link to similar disturbances that have taken place in Kosovo and Rwanda. The work is not a personal indulgence; it is about making sense through the medium of aesthetics. It is a question that is close to my heart since the significant ethical issues have a resonance for me. I want to register these issues, to mark what has happened; elimination, extermination and erasure. Within the broader questions of difference an important part of the project would be the possibility of creative difference. Such a combination of personal and public aspects holds a particular resonance at the start of the 21^st century. I would hope that the work that emerges would be distanced from its personal or historical specifications. “ Zarina Bhimji

Watch the film on zarinabhimji.com

On Postcolony

Francisco Tropa, "Scenário" , 2011.

“a headless figure threatened by madness and quite innocent of any notion of centre, hierarchy, and stability...a vast dark cave where every benchmark and distinction come together in total confusion, and the rifts of the tragic and unhappy human history stand revealed: a mixture of the half-created and the incomplete...in short, a bottomless abyss where everything is noise, yawning gap, and primordial chaos. “ Achilla Mbembe, political scientist

Occupy Museums

Tonight@16Beaver:

Please join us for an open forum to explore some of the following questions:
Is effective political protest possible inside the arts institution?
How does co-optation work, and can its dynamics be flipped in our favor?
Is political art neither political nor art?
What are the pros and cons of international mobility within the arts?
Is Occupy Museums, or other arts groups, co-opting Occupy Wall Street?
Who are our role models, those who have engaged in effective institutional
change? What are the historical precedents can we look to as we approach
this event?
What are some of the ways other Occupy groups are effectively working with
institutions?

La femme américaine libérée des anées 70s

Samuel Fosso, "La femme américaine libérée des anées 70" .


"In every photograph the beautiful Fosso is subject, object and creator. Occasionally he includes other people, but their posture and placement relegates them to a secondary position. In one stagy, understated and slightly bizarre image, for example, Fosso, in large sunglasses autographs a book for an anonymous man, who inclines deferentially towards him. In other photographs, like an indifferent, latter-day and urbanised Narcissus, he’s pictured sitting or standing with himself through the magic of a double exposure. The shallow depth of the studio is transformed with flowers, cane furniture and patterned cloth into a parody of a genteel boudoir. Unlike Narcissus, however, it’s impossible to separate the reflected Fosso from the original - like a happily married couple, one ‘self’ co-habits comfortably with the other. It’s interesting to compare these double images with 19th- and early 20th-century ‘before-and-after conversion’ double-portrait photographs distributed by European missionaries as proof of their ‘civilising’ influence on various African colonies. Fosso’s playful fragmentation of the self-portrait creates a clever counterpoint to the continent’s history of photographic colonialism, a form of aesthetic Euro-centrism, which reduced indigenous cultural and social complexities to convenient one-liners. "