Slow Movement or: Half and Whole
January 31st – March 22nd 2009
Helvetiaplatz 1
CH-3005 Bern
Tel +41(0)31 350 00 40
Fax +41(0)31 350 00 41
Adam Avikainen, Becky Beasley, Gerard Byrne, Michaela Frühwirth, Fernanda Gomes, Judith Hopf, Guillaume Leblon, Gabriel Lester, Kerry James Marshall, Nashashibi/ Skaer, Abraham Palatnik, Avery Preesman, Eileen Quinlan, Markus Raetz, Jimmy Robert, Sancho Silva
Curated by Elfriede Schalit and Philippe Pirotte
Slow Movement or: Half and Whole reflects on artistic strategies in connection with perception, orientation and narration. The exhibition focuses on stories that arise, as a process of deceleration sets in. This process is generated by the artworks included in the exhibition and is to be understood not only as a reduction of speed but also as a slowing down of perception through fragmentation, disintegration, etc.. Featuring art that creates its own time-span, the viewer will be confronted with works that accord time to an image as it is made, and as it shows itself. The artworks allow the viewer an experience with a “durée”, rather than the encountering of an event.
Dedicated to works of art, which direct their attention to phenomena in the world that cannot be perceived through hurried movements and gestures, the exhibition aims to slow down our senses. A decelerated movement opens up a parallel world, which proves to be very different from the continuous, streaming, digitalised one. In this context, Slow Movement functions as a strategy, which through the aspect of temporality, always points to the fragment and the fragmentary. It is precisely this experience of discontinuity and fragmentation, which produces meaning. The artworks generate ruptures in our understanding; they defy the causality with which we normally perceive our own place and time. Yet to do so, the artworks necessarily exclude themselves from the very place and time they reflect. As such, they become anachronistic, and dialectical.
Many of the works on exhibition recollect manifestations of the ordinary, the incidental and the everyday versus more universal musings. Showing the manifestations of the incidental and the everyday to be occasions for insight and awareness, the artworks included are very precisely directed towards a moment of epiphany. These works of art do not “create” a world, but rather point out an existing world. They show us the “catch” of an intellectual process: the fragment that managed to recuperate a movement.
To accompany the exhibition, a book will be published which will function as a well-founded, comprehensive programme catalogue: it is not so much a compilation of texts and images “about” the exhibition, the works and the topics at hand, but rather a collection of contributions, that shed light on various aspects related to deceleration, reflect further on them and prompt the reader to do the same. The book includes texts by Philippe Pirotte, Kevin Hart, Julian Reidy, Elfriede Schalit and Markus Verhagen.
Kunsthalle Bern
Helvetiaplatz 1
CH-3005 Bern
Tel +41(0)31 350 00 40
Fax +41(0)31 350 00 41
Opening hours
Tuesday – Friday 11am – 6pm
Saturday/Sunday 10am – 6pm