Weisses Rauschen (2013) Pedro Bandeira
Ruído Branco (weisses rauschen) foi uma intervenção de 24 horas na Biblioteca de Arte da Sitterwerk (St. Gallen, Suíça), que consistiu em virar ao contrário 11.000 livros (omitindo as respetivas lombadas), resultando uma superfície quase branca, irregular, sem títulos.
Aparente pesadelo de qualquer bibliotecário, pretendeu-se com esta intervenção proporcionar a total aleatoriedade na consulta de livros; uma experiência radical de investigação como metáfora da criação artística (desesperada).
No entanto, convém esclarecer que esta intervenção, que desordenou todos os livros nas prateleiras, só foi possível tendo em consideração que a Biblioteca de Arte de Sitterwerk está equipado com um sistema de computador, robotizada, que permite a localização de qualquer livro, a qualquer hora. Na realidade, os livros não dependem de um espaço ou uma ordem específica, eles estão sempre em movimento, permitindo criar entre si relações infinitas de vizinhança (o sonho de Aby Warburg).
Num momento em que livros impressos têm que lutar pela sua sobrevivência contra a sua existência digital, é interessante verificar que, no caso da Biblioteca de Arte de Sitterwerk, a tecnologia está lá para nos libertar e dar mais oportunidades na nossa relação com os livros.
Krüger & Pardeller, The Tower of Shadows, Le Corbusier, Chandigarh, 1965 (courtesy Hasso Hohmann), 2005. Pigment print, 78 x 102 cm.
Jeuno JE Kim & Lasse Krog Møller, “Greece
Gropers Silence Institute, Collection 1,
Disappearance, Eye chart,” 2012.
The main part of Holmqvist’s oeuvre consists of text, published in various periodicals and then processed into posters, readings, videos, wall drawings and installations. Highbrow and lowbrow, popular music, poetry, politics, literary quotations, references to art history and letters of the alphabet all interbreed. Words and sentences are moved around and combined in new, ambiguous ways.
“The punk movement and the idea that everybody can do anything have been vital to me. That is also one of the reasons why I work with language, since it’s something we all use and need to relate to and renew and invent all the time. Much of what I write is based on things I have misheard or ‘mis-thought’,” says Karl Holmqvist.
In this way, Karl Holmqvist manifests a faith in the power of art. Unexpected links, resonances and contextualisations create new relationships and produce a new reality. Although Holmqvist’s practice can be related to the tradition of concrete poetry and cut-ups, as well as to text-based artists such as Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger, he need not necessarily be interpreted within this context. When his texts are read aloud, sensual dimensions arise as rhythms and harmonies in pleasurable, sometimes humorous, soundgames. They are also memories, carefully observed and lived. Holmqvist mixes lines from Ezra Pound, the Bible, Patti Smith and Grace Jones, to name but a few, disregarding whether they “match” or not, revealing the contours of a life: of encounters, interests, observations, relationships and the Zeitgeist.
The Life of Others. Repetition and Survival
The Life of Others. Repetition and Survival
Akbank Sanat International Curator Competition 2012’s winning proposal
February 19–April 27, 2013
Akbank Sanat
İstiklal Cad. No:8
34435 Beyoğlu, İstanbul
Turkey
Curator: Alejandra Labastida
Akbank Sanat International Curator Competition is intended to provide support for emerging curators, reinforce interest in curatorial practices, and encourage new projects in the field of contemporary art. Akbank Sanat is proud to present the exhibition realized by the winning proposal of Alejandra Labastida at Akbank Art Centre, Istanbul.
The Life of Others. Repetition and Survival
“If repetition is possible, it is due to miracle rather than to law. It is against the law… If repetition exists, it expresses at once a singularity opposed to the general, a universality opposed to the particular, a distinctive opposed to the ordinary, and instantaneity opposed to variation / and an eternity opposed to permanence. In every respect, repetition is a transgression. It puts law into question, it denounces its nominal or general character in favor of a more profound and more artistic reality.”
–Gilles Deleuze, Repetition and Difference
Deleuze states that unlike resemblance, repetition is an act that arises in relation only to that which has no equal or equivalent and therefore concerns non-exchangeable and non-replaceable singularities. It is essentially a force that opposes the singular–as a transgression or exception–to the particular capable of being subsumed by laws. This project aims to postulate that the proliferation of artistic practices generated around appropriation and citation strategies—the translation and recreation of historical pieces or events—responds to this force that affirms the political status of the singularity—of the non-replaceable being—versus the domesticated paradigm of the equivalent and interchangeable.
Most exhibitions that explore this tendency focus on the decision that the artist makes from the present in order to rescue specific events and works. This project proposes to extend the question in order to consider not only the recreative will of the artist but also this singular power that wills itself. Walter Benjamin refers to “translatability” as an inherent demand of the original and therefore as the supreme proof of the life of the works of art. The relation between a translation and the original is literally vital: the former emerges as the result of an act of survival of the latter. It is, of course, not just a simple relation of equality and similarity but rather a process of renovation and evolution that unchains the conditions of possibility for a critical reformulation.
This critical process land on different strategies: translations, covers, reprises, recreations, re-appropriations; but what all of them share is repetition as the conduct of a vital relationship with the original. It is not just about postulating a reconstructed and reanimated body, but rather about making it present, for the first time, a second instance; or, as Deleuze proposes, to carry the first time to the “nth” power without having to pass through a second time. These works of art may therefore be inserted into a horizon where mimesis is understood not as representation but rather as a ritualized actualization. Repetition internalizes and therefore reverses itself: … it is not Federation Day which commemorates or represents the fall of the Bastille, but the fall of the Bastille which celebrates and repeats in advance all the Federation Days; or Monet´s first water lily which repeats all the others. Immersed in the apparatus of repetition, the works of the artists in this show reveal a power—a will willing itself despite every transformation and against every law. It is a will that postulates repetition as an essential task arising from the self-determination and freedom of a non-replaceable being.
