February 11–May 8, 2016
AZ Azkuna Zentroa
Plaza Arriquibar, 4
48010 Bilbao
Spain
info [at] azkunazentroa
www.azkunazentroa.com
“Sooner or later, we will all end up in retail,” American artist Jason Simon once predicted on the occasion of a talk that he gave at castillo/corrales in Paris. This was in 2009. It feels like a lifetime ago. The space in which we worked then became a hardware store, selling faucets, valves and hoses. Pressure systems, streams, drips and leaks—maybe the transformation into such a retail destination wasn’t so incongruous after all.
We had moved our activities elsewhere in the neighbourhood, taking over a run-down pharmacy with drawers still filled with long-expired pills for diseases that once were. It is there that we pursued our attempt at running a new kind of art gallery in times of art market frenzy.
Buildings get repurposed and new forms of influenza surface, continuously, at an accelerated pace today. An old-time wine warehouse located at the centre of a European city becomes a feared dark architectural mass for years before it gets revamped into an artcinemaswimminingpoolrestaurantsgymlibrarycentre. The future as the real condition for practice.
The exhibition fluxesfeverfuturesfiction curated by castillo/corrales at Azkuna Zentroa addresses the superabundant varieties and variants of economic power relations crowding the space of our contemporary lives and practices. But it disregards any pretence at, and even disputes the logic of, embracing this inflationary presence of economy as a system, a whole, an increasing abstraction that needs to be seized and chronicled. Instead, the exhibition aims at producing stark representations and materializations of economical figures and effects that cut through the conditions of ordinary life in the contemporary world.
The artists invited to participate in fluxesfeverfuturesfiction have been working in and out of conversation with the broad and systemic issues that are addressed in discourses in the realm of contemporary political economy. In their works, they have rather chosen to foreground, and to specify, the personal, affective, bodily, imaginative, or practical dimensions of our experiences of liveness in this overwhelmingly present moment.
When systemissuesproducstpresencerelationslogictodayembrace, what does the language say?
We’re entangled in a situation, an institution, a text, a norm, a thing. We can only enumerate, collect, complicate, and link. Or should we think episodes, elision and ellipsis? Look for obstacles, interruptions, defects, itches and rifts?
The reinvention of life from disturbance reemerges in cadences, rhythms, the smallest predictables.
What just happened?
Something has changed in the atmosphere of the present. It requires us to scratch off, to cough out, to feel off.
These are no ordinary times.
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