Life Under Representational Regimes
5–26 February 2011
Opening:
Friday 4 February, 6pm
White Space
// Office for Curating / Art / Theory
Militärstrasse 76
8004 Zurich
Switzerland
www.whitespace.ch
www.corner-college.com
project blog: recoco.tumblr.com
Opening times:
Wed. 3pm – 6pm / Fri., Sat. 2pm – 6pm
An exhibition project curated by Siri Peyer and Joshua Simon
Boaz Arad and Miki Kratsman, Ariella Azoulay, Zanny Begg and Oliver Ressler, Diego Castro, Francesco Finizio, Thomas Galler, Roee Rosen, Anna Witt, Hannes Zebedin
and the collection of Rudi Maier “so geht Revolution” – Advert & Revolt
ReCoCo – Life Under Representational Regimes is a long-term exhibition and platform for screenings and talks. The first exhibition will be shown between 5 February and 26 February 2011 in Zurich in a collaboration of White Space // Office for Curating/ Art/ Theory and Corner College. A second version of the exhibition will be shown at Kunsthalle Exnergassse Vienna between May and June 2011. A subsequent version will be developed at the Digital Art Lab in Holon in 2012.
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, citizenry and Nielsenism.
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, live TV and dead democracy.
Screenings:
Corner College
Perla-Mode
Langstrasse 84 / Brauerstrasse 37
8004 Zurich
Switzerland
www.corner-college.com
Saturday 5 February, 6pm
What would it mean to win? a film by Zanny Begg and Oliver Ressler, 40 min., 2008
Film screening and talk with Oliver Ressler
Saturday 26 February, 6pm
Advertising & Revolt – the collection of Rudi Mier
Screening and talk with Rudi Maier
Further venues:
Kunsthalle Exnergassse Vienna
Währinger Strasse 59
1090 Wien
Austria
kunsthalleexnergasse.wuk.at
12 May – 18 June 2011
Opening: Wednesday 11 May, 2011
Digital Art Lab Holon
The Israeli Center for Digital Art
16 Yirmiyahu Street
Holon 58835
Israel
www.digitalartlab.org.il
2012
