Tuesday, 08.12.2015
19:00h -
Thursday, 28.01.2016
Cold. War. Hot. Stars.
The Iron(y) Helmet of the Intellect
Denise Bertschi, SECOND TO NONE FIRST, 2014.
A group exhibition with
Denise Bertschi, Jackie Brutsche, Thomas Galler, Andreas Glauser, Andreas Marti, Nicolasa Navarrete, Sandra Sterle
From 09.12.2015 to 29.01.2016.
Opening on 9 December 2015, 19:00h.
At the opening
reading performance peace pills by Jackie Brutsche
and sound performance signal by BUG (Andreas Glauser and Christian Bucher).
With artist talks and parallel events (to be announced).
Curated by Dimitrina Sevova
Organized by Corner College
Opening hours:
Thu: 15:00h - 19:00h
Fri: 15:00h - 18:30h
Sat: 14:00h - 17:00h
[Deutscher Text unten]
The exhibition Cold. War. Hot. Stars. The Iron(y) Helmet of the Intellect displays a dystopian landscape produced by asymmetric relation of delirious realism and rigorous fiction in the time of global capital, with a certain sense of alienation, coldness and distance. It intensifies these affects and creates a space of reflection and a heterogeneous perceptual field that is simultaneously a close-range haptic space of proximity, on the backdrop of the recent mass media rhetoric announcing a new global crisis in which the world has never been closer to a New Cold War, a security crisis that escalates the fears of a future nuclear “option.” The exhibition inquires into some of these scenarios for the future from the past, and traces various historiographic lines or directions through the artistic practices and art works as seismographs of global social change. They sense the current symptoms “where everything is played in uncertain games, ‘front to front, back to back, front to back …,’ ” as consequences of the politico-social and economic developments after WW II, and the so-called Cold War, a period of propaganda, technologization and militarization of civil life in the competition between Western and Eastern blocs. The segmentary forms of the fight for control and domination altered the North and South lines of longitude and deepened the gap between the so-called Third World and the Western or advanced technological-industrial societies with their current development of a knowledge and service based economy. The exhibition undermines the stereotypes produced by binary abstract machines that overcode the divisions into a homogeneous West and a homogeneous East, into the “rich” North and the “poor” South. It proposes rather other focal points as thresholds to the outside, through which the South can be thought as a new trajectory of knowledge, aesthetics and practices of critique of cultural, ideological and technological hegemony, from which can emerge new lines of resistance and the potentiality of new cooperations, as everybody has their own South with electric palm trees, not only geographic and economic but personal and political, too.
The participating artists, through their practices based on research, appropriation, poetic displacements and personal aesthetic reflections on memory, cognition, attention, mass media, territory and technologies critically interrogate the past/future tensions and give a passage to the present impossibility of isolation through securitization, militarization and ideological separations in order to increase the modes of connection. With the irony of the intellect, which is a qualitative duration of consciousness, the exhibition aims to intensify and empower movements of deterritorialization that fabulate and produce desires to repeat over and over again the melody of The Plastic Ono Band’s Give Peace a Chance, grasped as a cosmopolitical proposal for the upcoming winter – not a military machine, but a mutating living machine on which one can take a flight or just stay in bed.
Text: Dimitrina Sevova
You can find a longer curatorial text in full length as a PDF on our materials website.
[Englisch text above]
Die Ausstellung Cold. War. Hot. Stars. The Iron(y) Helmet of the Intellect (deutsch etwa: Kalter. Krieg. Heisse. Sterne/Stars. Der eherne/ironische Helm des Intellekts) zeigt eine dystopische Landschaft, produziert aus der asymmetrischen Beziehung eines berauschten Realismus mit einer rigorosen Fiktion in Zeiten des globalen Kapitals, mit einem gewissen Gefühl der Entfremdung, der Kälte und der Distanz. Sie intensiviert diese Affekte und begründet einen Reflektionsraum und ein heterogenes Wahrnehmungsfeld, das gleichzeitig auch ein haptischer Raum im Nahfeld ist, vor dem Hintergrund neuerer Medienrhetorik, die eine neue globale Krise ankündigt, in der die Welt noch nie so nah an einem Neuen Kalten Krieg sein soll, eine Sicherheitskrise, die die Ängste vor einer zukünftigen nuklearen “Option” anheizt. Die Ausstellung erkundet einige dieser Szenarien für die Zukunft aus der Vergangenheit und zeichnet durch die künstlerischen Praktiken und Kunstwerke als Seismographen globaler sozialer Veränderungen unterschiedliche historiographische Linien nach. Sie spüren die aktuellen Symptome, “wo sich alles in ungewissen Spielen abspielt, ‘von vorn nach vorn, von hinten nach hinten, von vorn nach hinten …,’ ” aufgrund der politisch-sozialen und ökonomischen Entwicklung nach dem zweiten Weltkrieg und des so genannten Kalten Krieges, einer Periode der Propaganda, der Technologisierung und Militarisierung des zivilen Lebens im Wettlauf zwischen dem West- und dem Ostblock. Die segmentären Formen des Kampfes um Kontrolle und Vorherrschaft veränderten die nördliche und südliche Line der Längengrade und vertiefte den Graben zwischen der so genannten Dritten Welt und dem Westen bzw. den fortgeschrittenen technologisch-industriellen Gesellschaften mit ihrer derzeitigen Entwicklung einer wissens- und dienstleistungsbasierten Wirtschaftsform. Die Ausstellung untegräbt die Stereotypen, die von binären abstrakten Maschinen herrühren, die die Einteilung in einen homogenen Westen und einen ebenso homogenen Osten, in einen “reichen” Norden und einen “armen” Süden übercodieren. Sie schlägt vielmehr, als Schwelle zum Aussen, andere Schwerpunkte vor, durch die der Süden als neue Trajektorie des Wissens, der Ästhetik sowie der Praktiken der Kritik kultureller, ideologischer und technologischer Hegemonie, aus der neue Linien, aus welchen heraus neue Widerstandslinien und das Potential neuer Kooperationen auftauchen können, da jede_r ihren eigenen Süden hat mit elektrischen Palmen, nicht nur geographisch und wirtschaftlich sondern auch persönlich und politisch.
Durch ihre auf Forschung, Aneignung, poetischer Verschiebung und persönlicher ästhetischer Reflektionen über Erinnerung, Erkenntnis, Aufmerksamkeit, Massenmedien, Territorium und Technologien basierten Kunstpraktiken hinterfragen die teilnehmenden Künstler_innen kritisch die vergangenen/zukünftigen Spannungen und machen den Weg frei auf die gegenwärtige Unmöglichkeit der Isolation durch Sicherheitsmassnahmen, Militarisierung und ideologischer Auftrennung, um die Verbindungsmodi zu vermehren. Mit der Ironie des Intellekts, die einer qualitativen Dauer des Bewusstseins entspricht, macht sich die Ausstellung daran, Deterritorialisierungsbewegungen zu intensivieren und ermächtigen, die fabulieren und Begehren herstellen, immer von Neuem die Melodie von Give Peace a Chance von The Plastic Ono Band zu wiederholen, verstanden als kosmopolitischen Vorschlag für den kommenden Winter – nicht eine Militärmaschine, sondern eine mutierende lebendige Maschine, auf der man fliegen kann oder auch einfach im Bett bleiben.
Denise Bertschi
State Fiction
Denise Bertschi, State Fiction, book cover, 2014.
The project State Fiction is an exploration of the notion of Swiss neutrality, which utilizes the example of the Swiss ‹neutral› command in the Korean DMZ, which has been in operation since 1954 until the present. Bertschi has worked with material which has emerged from an investigation into a Swiss military archive of mostly self-representing documents about the life of Swiss soldiers during their mission in the DMZ. Her work interweaves found images and text-slogans into objects, which behold a sense of contradiction: they present both the feeling of the domestic and at the same time grotesque violence regarding the very geopolitical situation that these materials stem from.
Within the visual language used by the armed forces, Bertschi found a striking number of flower photographs, shot in a meticulously precise manner. Mobilizing a quiet and subtle tone, she questions the status of these images and what they tell us about the people who originally produced them.
The artist book STATE FICTION focuses on self-represented leisure activities of the DMZ command, photographed by Swiss personnel in the military camp located in the DMZ. The artist’s collection of these images questions the bizarre construction of ‹Little Switzerland› set within the militarized frontiers between North and South Korea.
Bertschi interprets neutrality as a sort of fiction, which forms the very identity of Swiss nationality and nationalism; meanwhile, being neutral is an extremely fragile state of being. ‹Helvetia Mediatrix› can be understood as a cover under which it leaves an open space for realities both unseen and unknown.
This project by Denise Bertschi is discussed by Nico Ruffo in the following article: http://www.srf.ch/kultur/kunst/schnappschuesse-aus-dem-koreanischen-sperrgebiet
Jackie Brutsche
UTOPEACE
Jackie Brutsche, Peacekeeper I, 2015.
In her latest work, UTOPEACE, developed in 2015 during a 3-week residency in Amsterdam, among other things the peace symbol of the "white dove" is staged variously as a heroin and as a quasi tragic figure.
Thomas Galler
American Soldiers
Thomas Galler, American Soldiers, video still, 2012.
2012
Single channel video, color, stereo sound, 5:22
American Soldiers features a collection of cover versions of Toby Keith's American Soldier (USA/2003) based on appropriated footage, originally published on YouTube by Jeffery, Joe, Zack, Debbie, The Scillan Family, Colin, Patrizio, Tasia, Shanda, Stephany, Kathy and some unknown.
Andreas Glauser
Mladost 2
Andreas Glauser, Mladost 2, video installation, 2000.
Audio / video installation, 2000.
« Das Wohngebiet Mladost 2 befindet sich ausserhalb des Stadtzentrums von Sofia und wird von Plattenbauten aus dem Sozialismus dominiert. « Mladost 2 » heisst übersetzt « Jugend 2 » . Dieses Wohngebiet, in welchem ich wohnte, inspirierte mich sehr. Eindrücke wie Stagnation, Verwilderung, Zerfall und Langeweile brachten mich dazu, die Fotografien als verschwommene, schwarz-weisse Videobilder nochmals in Erinnerung zu rufen. Die Videobilder werden von einer Audiospur, welche Rauschen und undefinierbare Geräusche zu einem dichten Netz verwebt, begleitet. Die Kombination von Bild und Ton spielt eine zentrale Rolle. »
« The neighborhood Mladost 2 lies outside the city center of Sofia and is dominated by prefabricated buildings from Socialist times. In translation, « Mladost 2 » means « Youth 2 » . This residential district, in which I lived, inspires me deeply. Impressions of stagnation, wilderness, decay and boredom brought me to recall the memory of the photographs as blurred, black-and-white video images. The video images are accompanied by a sound track that weaves noise and undefined sounds to a dense web. The combination of image and sound is key. »
Text: Andreas Glauser
Andreas Marti
Default Error
Andreas Marti, Default Error, 2011, photograph mounted on aluminum, 29.7 x 21cm.
Changed Condition
Andreas Marti, Changed Condition, 2010/07, photograph mounted between acryl.
Nicolasa Navarrete
Drawings
Nicolasa Navarrete, Untitled (The figure of the Chronicler), 2015. 200 x 150 cm, pencil on paper.
Thinking about the Cold War I started to (re)consider all the myths that were built about this conflict in our societies, a large part of which are still functional remnants of the subsequent historical defeat. Take for instance its own name: Cold War. Is it not an oxymoron? Can a war be cold? It was rather a hot war and I needed to go search for the myth that perfectly embodied this historic conflict. In a somehow Benjaminian endeavor, trying to unravel the threads on which these myths were constructed and that bind us to this imaginary past could be helpful to start rethinking about our past (building an alternative theory of the history that Benjamin call Historical materialism) and consequently about our future.
But again the impossibility to do it, only a text that refers to the text itself, as the story inside the story or the myth that appears in the myth. How I could grasp this historical past? The history is not a text, is fundamentally non-narrative and non-representational[...]However, the history is inaccessible to us except in textual form, the reality is; there is nothing but a text (1). And maybe there is not outside-text.
So then, how to be a genuine philosopher of the history?
How to be capable of respecting the specificity and radical difference of the social and cultural past, its forms, structures, experiences, and struggles,[...] with those of the present day? (bis) Maybe the only way to do so is through the history of the oppressor and oppressed, because the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles (bis). And finally, the text contain the key for understand “the text”. Inside-text.
(1) Fredric Jameson. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (NY: Cornell UP, 1981)
Text: Nicolasa Navarrete
Sandra Sterle
The Fortress of Utopia
Sandra Sterle, The Fortress of Utopia, 2015. Film still.
2015, color, stereo, PAL, 28 min. Production Kazimir, HAVC Croatian Audio Visual Fund.
The Fortress of Utopia is an experimental short
 film set in the former military bases of the Island of Vis in Croatia. The remains of its impressive military architecture serve as a stage for performances through which the author explores the nostalgia of the socialist past and its future perspectives. Not approaching the history of Yugoslavia directly, but merging facts and fiction in a peculiar way, the author introduces personages of contemporary tourists and stylized figures from the past in the same time and space, emphasizing the nature of memory (both personal and collective) and decay.
BUG (Andreas Glauser & Christian Bucher)
BUG at Institut für Neue Medien (INM), Frankfurt am Main, Germany, on 16 January 2015.
Sound performance signal at the opening.
Andreas Glauser: Synthesizer and modulated mixing desk
Christian Bucher: Drums and percussion
Jackie Brutsche
Jackie Brutsche, Peace Pills, 2015.
Reading performance peace pills at the opening.