[Oberlist] DE* evnt/expo: Subversive Practices

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http://www.wkv-stuttgart.de/en/programme/2009/exhibitions/conceptualism/introduction

Subversive Practices
INTRODUCTION

>From May 30 to August 2, 2009 the Württembergischer Kunstverein in
Stuttgart devotes itself to experimental and conceptual art practices that
had become established between the nineteen-sixties and eighties in Europe
and South America under the influence of military dictatorships and
communist regimes.

The exhibition, comprising around eighty artistic positions, has been
developed by a team of thirteen international curators in close
collaboration with the Kunstverein over a two-year process.

The exhibition’s nine sections will be focused on various contexts and
strategies of artistic production along with their positioning vis-à-vis
political and cultural repression in the GDR, Hungary, Romania, the Soviet
Union, Spain, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, and Peru. Of equal concern here
are both the particularities of and the relations between the different
temporal and local environments.

The exhibition undertakes the experiment of a shifted cartograph and an
extended understanding of conceptual art, which has become established
well beyond the Anglo-American canon. In this respect, the related
interdisciplinary, collaborative, and sociopolitical potentials are
particularly emphasized—that is, the paradigm shifts between visual arts,
politics, society, academia, architecture, design, mass media, literature,
dance, theater, activism, and so forth, which have been educed by these
potentials.

Furthermore, the focus is on artistic practices that not only radically
question the conventional concept of art, the institutions, and the
relationship between art and public, but that have, at the same time,
subversively thwarted structures of censorship and opposed the existing
systems of power. Here, body, language, and public space represent the
pivotal instruments, of resistance, symbolic and performative in equal
measure. The appropriation of media and distribution channels—especially
the postal service—has in turn played a distinctive role in the
establishment of the widely ramified networks between (Eastern) Europe and
Latin America.

SECTIONS

Progressive Images: Art in Chile under Dictatorship, 1973–1990
Ramón Castillo and Paulina Varas explore the play on content-related and
formal discontinuities, contradictions, and de- and recontextualizations
that characterized Chilean art from the nineteen-seventies to nineties. At
issue here are both the artistic potentials related to a rearticulation of
the cognitive and symbolic world—worlds that were at that time engaged by
the ideologies of the military dictatorship—and the question as to how
these potentials continue to be relevant today.

Political Bodies, Territories in Conflict
Fernando Davis is concerned with the artistic appropriation of the body
and of public space in the scope of the military dictatorship in
Argentina. The body was negotiated as an instrument of political
resistance. Artists countered the measured order of urban space, dictated
by dictatorial violence, with strategies of a poetic dèrive. Both cases
involved the subversion of the precepts of meaning imposed by the state
apparatus.

Alternative Networks
Cristina Freire centers in on the collection of conceptual artworks at the
Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo. During the
military dictatorship period, the museum played a decisive role in
providing space for free artistic expression and in forming a hub for the
international mail art scene. Photography, as a documentation and
distribution medium for performances, actions, and situations, along with
the subversive use of the body are posited at the heart of her
investigation.

Collective Actions: Trips out of Town, 1976–2009
Sabine Hänsgen focuses on the performances of the group Collective
Actions, that is, on their “Trips out of Town,” which have been carried
out since 1976 in rural areas surrounding Moscow. The actions have most
frequently taken place on an empty snow-covered field, a terrain
“liberated” from symbols and meanings. Hänsgen developed an “installation
as diagram” for the exhibition that comprehends an index of all previous
actions along with documentary materials and more recent satellite images
of the action spaces.

Crosscurrent Passages: Dissident Tactics in Peruvian Art, 1968–1992
Miguel López and Emilio Tarazona investigate two phases of
aesthetic-political practices in Peru: first, during the military
dictatorship from 1968 to 1975 and, second, during the no-less-violent
guerilla war in the nineteen-eighties. While the nineteen-seventies were
characterized by the dawn of institutional critique and participative art
forms, art was later viewed first and foremost as a space for political
protest, for the re-elaboration of Andean modernity, as well as a means of
processing the repercussions of violence.

Between Limits: Escaping into the Concept
Ileana Pintilie Teleagă highlights artistic “survival techniques” and
subversive strategies that originated in Romania during the era of the
communist regime, or Ceauşescu’s dictatorship. Evoking the body as an
equally private and political realm for artistic experimentation counted
among these strategies, as did ephemeral, ironic, and sociocritical
approaches. Moreover, despite extreme isolation, access to international
mail art existed in Romania.

1969–1979: An Approach to the Confluences Between Art, Architecture, and
Design in Catalonia
Valentín Roma and Daniel García Andújar fathom the interplay between
critical conceptual practices in art, architecture, and design in
Catalonia during the final decade of Franco’s dictatorial reign. At the
core are six works by Grup de Treball in which interdisciplinary working
methods are reflected. These works are contextualized by an archive
compiled from various sources, by other artistic works, and by interviews
specifically conducted for the exhibition with players from the period in
question.

Tomorrow Is Evidence!
Annamária Szöke and Miklós Peternák exploratively question the present-day
relevance of subversive potentials presented by experimental and
conceptual art of the nineteen-sixties through nineties in Hungary. In
this context, they primarily focus on works that were destroyed, lost, or
never realized, that is, those necessitating a reconstruction or
restaging. In some cases, the artists are directly involved in the process
and are thus effectuating a reevaluation of their earlier projects.

Playing with the System: Artistic Strategies in the GDR from 1970 to 1990
Anne Thurmann-Jajes spotlights the alternative art forms that succeeded in
becoming established, beyond the sphere of official art doctrine and
censorship, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties in the GDR. Access to
the international networks of mail art, along with the so-called
living-room galleries or original-graphic magazines, opened up
opportunities for artistic experimentation with image, language,
performance, sound, and film.

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