Two projects in dialogue by Electric Palm Tree in collaboration with SMBA and Casco
The Demon of Comparisons
28 March – 17 May 2009
Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (SMBA)
www.smba.nl
The Antagonistic Link
29 March – 17 May 2009
Casco, Office for Art, Design and Theory, Utrecht
With Heman Chong, Hafiz, Tibor Hajas, Beom Kim, Sung Hwan Kim, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Tadasu Takamine, with special contributions by Philippe Rekacewicz and Grace Samboh
Curated by Binna Choi in collaboration with Kyongfa Che and Cosmin Costinas.
Opening: Friday 27 March 2008, 17:00 at SMBA, accompanied by the lecture-performance Finders Keepers by Jeuno Kim.
The Demon of Comparisons is an association of subjective positions relating in various ways to larger social and political frameworks, to power and cultural constructions. Placing emphasis on the issue of individual agency in a landscape defined by questions of national and cultural identities, The Demon of Comparisons questions the kind of collectivity these subjects can form. The title is a translation of a phrase from Jose Rizal’s novel Noli Me Tangere, “el demonio de las comparaciones”, also used by Benedict Anderson as the title of his book, where it is rendered as The Specter of Comparisons. An original and insightful thinker, Benedict Anderson questioned the patterns and the meeting points that are to be found throughout geographies, times and power structures that lead to formations of identities and various senses of belonging. Our translation remains anchored in this area of interest, but is intended to add the potential of the polisemy, indeed the spectres, of the original Spanish word, “demonio”, in dealing with the subjectivity of one’s experience of culture and power.
The Demon of Comparisons grew out of exchanges and discussions during Open Circuit #1: Yogyakarta, organized by Electric Palm Tree in September 2008 in Indonesia. During the week-long workshop, participants shared and negotiated their experiences and vocabularies of social transformation from their respective backgrounds.
Seminar The Demon of Comparisons with Michele Faguet, Patrick D. Flores, Vit Havranek, Hiroshi Yoshioka, Ahmad bin Mashadi, David Riff
Saturday 4 April 2009, 11:00-18:00 at Doelenzaal, University of Amsterdam (Singel 421-427, 1012 WP Amsterdam)
Curated by Cosmin Costinas in collaboration with Kyongfa Che and Binna Choi.
The seminar is conceived of as a space for dialogue among a number of writers, researchers, philosophers and curators who in their practice have been committed to questioning underlying processes of history writing in a shifting canon and a changing geography of artistic practice. Working on narratives and practices that lie on the borders of a (Western) canonic representation of art and its political dimensions, often at the fault line between forms of modernism, avant-garde urgencies and the articulations of the political in the different cultural landscapes they are interested in, the speakers share an interest in the critical tools to be employed in their endeavors. Focusing on spaces with histories as different as Latin America, Eastern Europe and South East Asia, the seminar will explore the ambivalence of comparative approaches, with all their strategic promises and critical traps.
The Antagonistic Link
Mixrice, Hwa Yeon Nam, Nam June Paik, Sasa [44] with Sulki & Min
Curated by Binna Choi
Opening: Saturday 28 March, 17.00 with a first staging of the writing and performance series Ongoing propositions under different conditions, conducted by theorist and writer Sönke Hallmann and artist Achim Lengerer.
The Antagonistic Link is an experimental setting for drawing transnational links in the form of an agonistic process that assumes the opposing parties to be in a state of conflicting coexistence. The Antagonistic Link uses ‘Bye Bye Kipling’, a historical satellite event conceived by Nam June Paik in 1986, as a point of departure. The exhibition combines this piece with three other projects initiated by artists and designers from South Korea, as well as other related activities. All these works explore the constructive possibilities of overcoming the sense of distance and antagonism that is the paradoxical product of advancing globalization.
“East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet”, the first line of The Ballad of East and West, a poem by Rudyard Kipling, opens up Paik’s live satellite link-up of Japan, Korea and the United States – a broadcast featuring different sorts of cultural events and performances. Paik designed and coordinated the event with the intention of countering this poetic declaration (which, to be fair, is also undermined in the rest of Kipling’s poem as he suggests that individuals are capable of this after all). The video is a shorter edit of the original broadcast and reveals various ironic and fractious moments in such a linkage. This may be a starting point for questioning the complexities and contradictions inherent in today’s communication channels and global links — an inquiry that neither denies nor blithely celebrates the possibilities of transnational connection.
Discussion on Estrangement with curator Aneta Szylak (director of Wyspa Institute of Art, Gdansk) and artist Hiwa K. on their collaborative initiative ‘Estrangement’.
Thursday 9 April at 20.00 at Casco
Performance Operational Play
Saturday 16 May at 14.00 (starting from Casco)
A participatory performance of Operational Play, a project by Hwa Yeon Nam in the context of The Antagonistic Link, takes place at six different locations across the city on 16 May 2009. The 16 players are involved in a collaborative performance based on 23 wars, between 1940 and 2006 and restages them across Utrecht. Each actor masquerades under pseudonyms that represent various operational wars like: Operation Queen, a joint British-American operation during World War II in the Hurtgen Forest near Aachen, and some that are still very vivid on our minds like Operation Blue Tiger and Desert Scorpion, the names of the two invasions in Iraq. Please check Casco website or contact (Jakob van Stolk: jakob@cascoprojects.org) to find out more and participate in the performance.
Exhibition design in collaboration with Susanne Pietsch.
Electric Palm Tree is an initiative of Kyongfa Che and Binna Choi, joined by Cosmin Costinas, and established in early 2008 as an ongoing project for transnational artistic research. More information about Electric Palm Tree is available at www.electricpalmtree.org. For further inquiries, please write to info@electricpalmtree.org.
For more information on the project, please contact Kerstin Winking (kerstin@smba.nl) or Magali Meijers (magali@cascoprojects.org).
The activities of Electric Palm Tree in the period of 2008 and 2009 are made possible by the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture.