Ideas after ideology
Grzegorz Drozd, Karen Mirza and Brad Butler, Javier Rodriguez, Konrad Smoleński, Maciek Stępiński, Radek Szlaga
9 October–5 November 2011
Private view with the artists
Sunday 9 October, 2–6pm
waterside contemporary
2 Clunbury Str
London N1 6TT
T +44 2034170159
info@waterside-contemporary.com
www.waterside-contemporary.com
waterside contemporary is pleased to announce the inaugural show in its new gallery space in Hoxton.
They don’t know why, but they keep doing it brings together six artists whose practices reflect on the role of ideology in a post-ideological landscape.
Ideologies structure and simplify reality. They emerge where the Symbolic is not able to adequately translate the Real. We resort to using simplification, brand historical concepts, we give names to movements and phenomena.
The artists, aware of these mechanisms, reject the obvious, doubting the potential of ideologised thought and production. Working in paint, installation and video, they expand into the post-participatory, the post-media, and chart the past-punk and the past-colonial.
These artistic narratives are based on the overbearing here and now. Spilling out of context, the artists produce hallucinatory newspaper headlines, trash baroque icons, surreal minefields and post-apocalyptic barbecues. Faced with this fracture of the Real, we are as viewers released from the circumstantial, and are drawn into a world of the unconscious artistic gesture.
The exhibition is accompanied by Mirror World, a large-scale publishing intervention by Javier Rodriguez, distributed at London newsstands.
Curated by Piotr Sikora and Pierre d’Alancaisez
waterside contemporary
Pierre d’Alancaisez founded Waterside Project Space on Wharf Road, East London in 2008. waterside contemporary re-launches in nearby Hoxton in October 2011. Olga Ovenden joined the gallery as co-director.
waterside contemporary is committed to developing an ambitious and vibrant multidisciplinary and cross-generational programme. Representing a portfolio of UK and international artists, the gallery brings institutional-quality exhibitions to London art audiences and market and supports the artists through curatorial projects and international art fairs.
d’Alancaisez and Ovenden share an interest in determined and engaged art practices. An international commitment allows the gallery to foreground current and historical overseas debates in a London context. The gallery’s programme and projects encompass practices that pertain to and stem from political periphery, and conceptually-driven work of mid-career European and UK artists.
