Items Tag › soup.fffff.at

Enacting Populism opens Feb 17th in Paris

ENACTING POPULISM IN ITS MEDIÆSCAPE Curated by Matteo Lucchetti February 18 – April 22, 2012 Press conference: Thursday February 16 at 11 am at Kadist Art Foundation Opening reception: Friday, February 17 from 6 to 9 pm. Alterazioni Video, Heman Chong, Luigi Coppola, Danilo Correale, Foundland, Nicoline van Harskamp, Steve Lambert, Oliver Ressler, Anna Scalfi Eghenter, Société Réaliste, Jonas Staal, Superflex. with a screening program curated by le peuple qui manque a public conversation with Ernesto Laclau (Thursday February 9, 7-9 pm) Kadist Art Foundation is pleased to present Enacting Populism in its mediaescape, an exhibition curated by Matteo Lucchetti, following his residency at the Foundation. Enacting Populism is an on-going project on the possible relationships between art practices and the populist mediascape that connotes the current political zeitgeist of Europe. At Kadist Art Foundation this project will develop into an exhibition that will take place during the last two months of the presidential elections campaign in France. The space here is interpreted as a sui generis political bureau, immersing the exhibition in an ambivalent environment where the works can be seen as elements belonging to a political party office where a campaign is being prepared. The show is focusing on the European populism that has heavily influenced the public imagery on politics for the last twenty years. Its leaders and agitators understood at an early stage the shift that occurred both in portraying the figure of the politician and in the role of the political discourse in the mediascape. In fact, when political ideologies ceased to give shape to the political agendas, with the end of the Cold War, the Western parties started to progressively mirror this ending with the flattening of their positions in the public debate, starting to respond only to a general capitalism discourse about a global market that needed to find its way. From that point the political action softened the natural antagonism of democracy, thus creating a lack of opposite and distinct political projects. This situation left space for a popular frustration to arise and consequently demagogues articulated it. Therefore those who understood how the space of politics worked slowly moved from being representative to openly playing with its representation in the media. Ernesto Laclau was one of the first to acknowledge to populism a dimension inherent to any democratic regime, looking at it through a historical perspective and not just as a right wing party phenomenon. As Laclau states,“democratic politics requires the construction of a ‘people’ on the basis of one or more empty signifiers as well as an antagonism between ‘us’ and ‘them’ “ . In order to create alternative, cheap and fictional feelings of belonging, or rather in order to ‘construct’ that empty signifier that is ‘the people’, the visual strategies that take place on a daily basis in the media might not only be seen as completely distorted productions of our times. Instead, they can also be considered as materials that can be easily deconstructed, so as to offer a clearer vision on what democracy looks like today. The process of enacting populism, to make the aesthetic strategies embedded in the creation of a visible consensus, comes together with interferences put at play with the mediascape. Here, the artistic projects find new potentialities to impact the contemporary imagery on politics as seen in the works produced for the show. Moreover, developing a historical perspective on the idea we have on populism, generates tools through which an awareness is created. Read an extended version of this text here.

February 11 2012, 1:07pm | Comments »

April 4 MFA Boston Colloquium: From Appropriation to Infiltration…

From Appropriation to Infiltration: Accessing Public through Tactical Media You are cordially invited to attend the upcoming MFA Graduate Program Colloquium for spring 2011. WHEN: Monday April 4th, 10:30 AM – 4:30 PM WHERE: The Remis Auditorium at the Museum of Fine Arts located at 465 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA. TOPIC: This colloquium intends to facilitate a rigorous conversation at the point where performance and appropriation tactics intersect our technologically mediated public sphere. With interest in eliciting a healthy range of perspectives, faculty member Nate Harrison and MFA graduate student Jordan Tynes have invited a group of artists and activists to present their projects and working methods. Each representing a model for critical cultural practice today, all share in common an interest in the infiltration of the apparatuses of mass media and its construction of a public towards renewed senses of autonomy and agency. SPEAKERS: Bill Drummond is a Scottish musician, media personality, record producer, writer and artist. He is best known as co-founder of late 1980s avant-garde “pop group” The KLF and its 1990s “avant-art” media-manipulating successor, the K Foundation. He has also written several books, produced a variety of different conceptual art projects, and helped to set-up The Foundry, an arts centre in Shoreditch, London. Drummond’s current project is a choir called The17. Steve Lambert made international news just after the 2008 US election with The New York Times “Special Edition,” a replica of the grey lady announcing the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other good news. He is the founder of the Anti-Advertising Agency, lead developer of Add-Art (a Firefox add-on that replaces online advertising with art) and has collaborated with numerous artists including the Graffiti Research Lab and the Yes Men. Eva and Franco Mattes are the Brooklyn-based artist-provocateurs behind the infamous website 0100101110101101.org. Pioneers of the Net Art movement, they are renowned for masterful subversions of public media, such as their notorious (and unauthorized) Nike advertising campaign. Superflex (Rasmus Nielsen) is a Danish artists’ group founded and directed by Jakob Fenger, Rasmus Nielsen and Bjørnstjerne Christiansen. It has been working since 1993 on a series of projects related to economic forces, democratic production conditions and self-organization. Marisa Olson‘s work combines performance, video, drawing & installation to address the cultural history of technology, the politics of participation in pop culture and the aesthetics of failure.

March 22 2011, 10:39am | Comments »

Search

Enacting Populism opens Feb 17th in Paris

April 4 MFA Boston Colloquium: From Appropriation to Infiltration…