ReCoCo: Life Under Representational Regimes
12 May - 18 June 2011
|
| © Thomas Galler
Bright Star, 2010,
Set of 10 postcards, unlimited edition |
| |
RECOCO: LIFE UNDER REPRESENTATIONAL REGIMES
12 May - 18 June, 2011
Boaz Arad and Miki Kratsman, Ariella Azoulay, Lisa Biedlingmaier, Diego
Castro, Köken Ergun, Francesco Finizio, Thomas Galler, Roee Rosen, Anna
Witt, Hannes Zebedin, and the collection of Rudi Maier "so geht
Revolution" – Advert & Revolt
An exhibition project curated by Siri Peyer and Joshua Simon
Resignation, conspiracy and corruption (ReCoCo), have become the ways in
which we understand and narrate politics. ReCoCo - Life Under
Representational Regimes comes at a time of shared understanding that
the political devices that have been established since the beginning of
modern democracy, namely those of liberal democracies, are in a
deepening crisis, especially since the collapse of the Soviet Block.
For the majority today, political agency takes its form as resignation,
political truth arrives in the shape of conspiracy theories and
governance is synonymous with corruption. As we are subjected to a
politics of representation in two ways—one is the system of political
representation (parliamentary regimes) and the other is that of the
representation of politics (through the media), we find ourselves to be
both the sovereign ("The people") and the audience of spectators ("The
viewers"). This dual status produces a series of paradoxes: political
resignation becoming a new form of agency; ignorance becoming our
political knowledge; passivity turning to be our political activism.
In these post-democratic times, under the rule of Capital's technocratic
Fascisms, a form of conspirative knowledge has emerged and we find
ourselves reading images from the media—photos, captions, headlines, and
news stories—in a paranoid way. The 24/7 live catastrophe on the news
networks produces a constant disbelief. The same questions arise over
and over: where did this image come from? Who brought it to my
knowledge? Why am I seeing this?
ReCoCo - Life Under Representational Regimes answers to the discursive
explosion of conspiracy theories, which stems from a widespread
re-visioning of liberal politics. ReCoCo is a term through which we can
look at the construction and organization of various political concepts
of representational regimes: transparency and media, spectatorship and
sovereignty, censorship and hegemony and citizenry.
ReCoCo - Life Under Representational Regimes puts these forms of
knowledge and power, and the aesthetic economies that they produce in
negotiation with artistic practice. This, at a moment of enhanced
ornamentalisation of the classical political gestures of sovereignty—a
rococo of those tropes (hence the echoing of term in the title). The
exhibition brings together contemporary works that engage with
questioning truth regimes and representational governments,
experimenting with the performance of representations and the inactivity
embedded in contemporary parliamentary systems, exploring spectacle and
conspiracy, political spaces of appearance and political resignation,
corruption and governance, the death of journalism and the rise of new
non-representational forms such as wikileaks and live TV.
kunsthalle.wuk.at
|