Sub Real: Reality Survival Strategies
05/04/2003 - 30/04/2003
Smart Project Space
1e Constantijn Huygensstraat 20
Amsterdam
Phone: + 31 20 427 59 51
Fax: + 31 20 427 59 53
info@smartprojectspace.net
www.smartprojectspace.net
curated by Bartolomeo Pietromarchi
opening: April 5th from 9.00 pm.
Image: Micol Assaël, Vorkuta, 2001-2003
micol assaël
mark bain
marco boggio sella
martin creed
john bock
piero golia
cesare pietroiusti
santiago sierra
SELF CONSCIOUSNESS – MENTAL LOCATION – ANONYMOUS COMMUNICATION – NATURAL CONDITION OF MANKIND – INTEGRATION/DISINTEGRATION – SELF CONTROL – (DISTR)ACTION – LOSS OF IDENTITY
Contemporary art must face up to the redefinition of the concepts of reality, experience and identity. In the contemporary era the concept of experience has undergone a profound transformation: the increasingly all-consuming media representation and the standardisation of models of life alienated by repetition have gradually eroded its status as reality.
The spread of models of behaviour and aesthetic models subjects individual experience to standardisation and assimilation. This process has reached its height in what Guy Debord has defined the Society of spectacle, where the image constructed and chosen by someone else has become the individuals main relationship with the world, a society, therefore, in which the mediated relationship replaces the empirical and phenomenal certainty of personal experience.
The unique, singular value of experience has gradually been replaced by a relationship with the world shaped in its collective dimension and standardised in its representation constructed on the basis of mass, consumerist models where the very social relationship between people is mediated through images.
The exhibition presents the work of artists who, by avoiding placing themselves in a position of competition with the predominance of the image and the transformation of reality into spectacle, opt for transversal paths, with works that infiltrate the folds of reality and bring to light its contradictions, revealing its weak points to suggest a different interpretation.
In this sense the artist adopts strategies characterised by radical attitudes: secrecy, infiltration, parasitism, negation, excess. This sub real is thus formed of the leftovers of reality, where the value of experience is restated in a process of radicalisation and of excess, the image is negated, taken apart and short-circuited, the figure of the artist is concealed until it is no longer recognisable.
The artist thus takes on the features of a clandestine intruder forced to imagine and invent strategies for survival in the face of a reality that tends increasingly to limit and ignore the space for personal reflection and the value of the individual.
Eight fundamental concepts form the key to reading of the exhibition: a series of texts downloaded from the Internet form a conceptual accompaniment to the works of the artists and provide starting points for reflection for a path through the meanders of identity made up of extremely different elements, where true and false, high and low culture, real and imaginary, individual and collective are mixed together without excluding each other. An identity constructed through elements found and recomposed that make it multiple, flexible, and adaptable, almost impossible to recognise and identify.
SELF CONSCIOUSNESS – MENTAL LOCATION – ANONYMOUS COMMUNICATION – NATURAL CONDITION OF MANKIND – INTEGRATION/DISINTEGRATION – SELF CONTROL – (DISTR)ACTION – LOSS OF IDENTITY
The exhibition is realised in collaboration with the Adriano Olivetti Foundation, Rome
