Curator: Joanna Sokołowska
Participants: Zbynek Baladran (CZ), Grigor Khachatryan (AM), Anna Molska (PL), Ioana Nemes (RO), Skart (SRB), Clemens von Wedemeyer (DE)
"To be con-temporary (…) means to be “with time” rather than “in
time.” “Con-temporary” in German is “zeitgenössisch.” As Genosse means
“comrade,” to be con-temporary—zeitgenössisch—can thus be understood as
being a “comrade of time”—as collaborating with time, helping time when
it has problems, when it has difficulties." (Boris Groys)
Why do contemporary artists become such active “comrades of time”
intervening in the ways in which time is framed by the historical
meta-narratives implicit in contemporary social spaces? The exhibition
relates this question to artistic practices that confront dilemmas
posed by the representation, remembrance and actualisation of the past
as far as it concerns projects of socialist and communist modernity. In
the artists’ works, two principal interconnected modes of thought can
be detected: on the one hand, a reflection on the possible meanings of
the layers of history present in architecture and other forms of the
organisation of life, in particular questioning the way history is
mediated and medialised. Thus, the focus here is on the contemporary
conditions of the production of the experience of the past. On the
other hand, a strong emphasis is also placed on thinking about the
emancipatory aspect of modernity as an unfinished project. From this
perspective, the urgent need is to assess modernity’s present-day
potential and at the same time critically examine its mistakes.
Modernist ideological projects can be seen with especial intensity in
the construction process, in acts of destruction and rebuilding that
are inexorably linked with the writing of history and a policing of
memory. “Narrative and construction,” notes Ricoeur, “bring about a
similar kind of inscription, the one in the endurance of time, the
other in the enduringness of materials. Each new building is inscribed
in urban space like a narrative within a setting of
intertextuality”. Destruction can erase or suspend old histories
in time, and thus announce the inception of new narratives. The process
of the production and reproduction of the social space in which the
evolving urban fabric, architecture and design function forms an
interesting challenge for artists, in as much as they interpret it as a
palimpsest composed not just of spectacular, visible and physical
temporo-spatial layers, but also of multiple invisible and immaterial
strata piled on top of one another. Artists are not so much concerned
with the uncovering and presentation of an erased text that may once
have existed, but encode or reactivate it, exposing the current context
in which it might emerge. It is here that artists are active comrades
of time, mixing frames recognized from descriptions of history and
inventing new trajectories for past events. Interested in the complex
nature of the desire to grasp the past, they perform transformations on
the senses ascribed to it, making use, for example, of the method of
repetition or remakes. Repetition is in fact an actualization of the
conditions of production that emerge from a reworking of the past.
The exploration of the traces of a lost utopia in contemporary social
space that is present in the works of Clemens von Wedemeyer
(“Silberhöhe”, “Die Siedlung”) , Zbyněk Baladrán (“Glossary”,
“Socio-fiction II”) and Grigor Khachatryan (“Churches”) is
connected with a question as to the mediation of the imagining and
remembering of them through the different images and various
technologies operative in the field of visual culture: fiction
and documentary films, video and television. Probing images through
different modes of their “technical reproducibility” they get to the
very heart of the contemporary immaterial and affective aspect of
an economy that generates first and foremost mediated images and
desires.
The question of the contemporary emancipatory potential of
revolutionary ideas, of socialism and communism, and the role of art in
the transformation of society are taken up in the works of Škart (“Our
Miracle”) Anna Molska (“W=F*S (Work)”, “P=W:t (Power)”) and
Zbyněk Baladrán. What conditions produce the need to even ask such
questions today? The artists` suggestions can be seen
within the discussions of the problem of the erasing of communism
from the history of the societies that experienced it, or the simple
treating of it as a mistake, a temporary break in the universal
striving towards capitalism. This amnesia and the lack of new political
horizons was one of the factors supposed to facilitate the domination
of the current paradigm in which antagonisms are subdued. The strength
of negated sentiments can lead to the fantasy of reconstructing lost,
a-historical, stable and “true” traditions in the sense described by
Svetlana Boym as “restorative nostalgia” and to an explosive “return of
the repressed.” The artists propose a working through of the past
through returning to it and testing its elements today.
Their work on modes of recalling, forgetting or reactivating the former
ideas of socialist modernity, elements of which still contribute to the
production of the spaces in which we live, enables a reassessment of
the contemporary potential of art in relation to the new economy, to
forms of organisation of life and to the initiation of collective
experiences. (Extras from the publication "Comrades of Time")
Publication: "Comrades of Time", with texts by Joanna Sokolowska, Boris
Groys, Juli Carson.
Published by PAVILION - journal of politics and culture,
English/Romanian, 80 pages, B/W, 13,5 x 18,5 cm, softcover, 7 Euro.
This project is supported by POLISH INSTITUTE BUCHAREST.
Image: Grigor Khachatryan, Churches, 1997, video still, courtesy of
the artist.
Ioana Nemes's project Monthly Evaluations goes back to 2001 and is inextricably linked to the events which led to the discovery of her artistic vocation. For Nemes was a professional handball player until an injury put an end to her career and she decided to be an artist. A new world opened to her and to get a perspective on it, she evolved The Wall Project on the dining room wall of the small flat she shared with her mother and twin brother. The wall was divided into two sections, with one side chronicling Nemes's aspirations and unrealized projects while the other chronicled aspirations that had been met and projects that had been realized. Every time a slip was moved from one side to the other, Nemes took a photo and archived it.
In 2004, two things happened that were key to the project: The Wall Project was shown in a gallery, and Nemes moved out of the flat. These events impacted on the project, which came increasingly to be focused around how time might be made visible. Nemes developed a strong interest in the British writer Virginia Woolf's understanding of time, John Fowless narrative and the Swiss psychologist Max Lüscher's ideas about colour, and out of this came Monthly Evaluations. Nemes developed a system with five parameters: physical, emotional, intellectual, financial and the luck factor. Since 2005, each day has been evaluated against these parameters; it is allocated a colour and a quotation or a saying before being archived along with all the other days.
When Monthly Evaluations goes on show, Nemes ponders all the other works to be shown in the exhibition and its overarching idea, and subsequently goes through her archive, plucking out a small clutch of days. These are then translated into murals or plastic objects that resemble funerary stones.
Even though Nemes's starting premise is her own self-realization project, Monthly Evaluations describes a more generic experience which relates to work, ambition, progress and happiness. The project argues for a conception of identity, which, rather than remaining static, is something the individual is continually shaping on the basis of the options and opportunities that present themselves. This is the starting point for Nemes's critical stance vis-à-vis the settings in which she is a player: exhibitions, the wider art scene and the new Europe.
Within the artist-talk at Pavilion Unicredit, Ioana Nemes will explain the context and the reasons that led to the emergence and development of the Monthly Evaluations project – an experiment attempting to render visible (via colors and numbers) the time elapsed throughout a month.
http://ioananemes.tumblr.com
Image: "Positive & Negative", 2004. Courtesy of the artist