In Our Words, An Intergenerational Dialogue
The current exhibition is the third iteration of a 2022 show curated by the late filmmaker’s partner and collaborator Antje Ehmann. The previous two versions, installed at Forum Stadtpark in Graz, Austria, and Galerie Barbara Weiss in Berlin, had a different title, itself somewhat vague: “Against War.” In 2024, however, after ten months of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, the word “war” takes on a new specificity, and a stance against war is, for some, suddenly controversial.
The removal of the work from the studio also removes it from the networks of relation that might lend it meaning. Anyone who has witnessed the transformation of an object that has been kicked around a studio for two years into something to be handled with kid gloves when it leaves for the gallery will be sympathetic to the idea that it is precisely this abstraction from contexts that establishes the object as a “work of art,” with all of the implications of value and status connoted by the term.
Archival documents “are not items of a completed past, but rather active elements of a present,” writes Ariella Azoulay. As e-flux Criticism takes a break from publishing new material in August, the editors have selected a few pieces from our free-to-access archive of more than 1,700 articles that might relate in new and unexpected ways to the moment. These articles—on subjects ranging from feminist video collectives in France to a Moroccan school of painters working against Eurocentric histories of modernism—offer reminders that to illuminate the present often requires that we look to, and reimagine, the past.
Yi’s photographs of urban life, captured mostly outside and on the move, were inspired in part by Jackson Pollock’s action painting. He took these pictures not just intuitively but almost at random, moving the camera, his body, or both, sometimes mounted on his arm or hung around his neck, and often without looking through the viewfinder first. The mostly black-and-white photographs that result are as blurry, claustrophobic, and raw as you’d expect. They suggest the adrenalized mood of a country disoriented by breakneck change and uneasy about the relationship between the individual and the collective.
Curator Pavel Pyś’s serious engagement with current scholarship is reflected in the show’s key choices: its regional and thematic (rather than nation-state) focus; its demonstration of the ways Eastern European culture was not completely isolated behind the Iron Curtain and shared in international artistic concerns; its extensive representation of “new media”; its choice to frame its main ideas around “experimental” work; its acknowledgment that experimental work was produced both outside and inside state-run institutions; and its commitment to not reducing every creative gesture to an up or down vote on state-socialism.
What emerges from Thuring’s preparatory perambulations through internet searches, archival material, vintage postcards on eBay, maps, and photographs is a disarming series of paintings that read a bit like abstract translations of the source material. These are transmissions from across time and space, queered by technology, distorted by the turning over of centuries, and infused with Thuring’s irrepressible imagination and aesthetic panache.
We write you this public letter as professionals working in museums, arts organisations and universities, as well as supporters of Slovak art and culture. We urge you to reconsider your decision to dismiss the Director General (DG) of the Slovak National Gallery (SNG), Alexandra Kusá, following the dismissal of the Director of the Slovak National Theatre, Matej Drlička. This decision has undermined the independence of the cultural field in your country and damaged the trust in and reputation of Slovak culture internationally.
In Our Words, An Intergenerational Dialogue
