Economies of the Imaginary

The participants in the International Fellowship Program for Art and Theory 2015–16 are granting insights into their projected work of the coming months.

Exhibition Details:

Economies of the Imaginary
Andrea Bellu, Fokus Grupa, Benjamin Tiven, Marina Vishmidt & Anthony Iles
curated by Andrei Siclodi

Opening (in the frame of the Start up Lectures 2015/16): Fri Oct 16, 2015, 7 p.m.
Duration of exhibition: October 19 – December 17, 2015

Opening hours:
Tue, Wed 2 – 5 p.m.
Thu 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.
(Outside of normal opening hours, by individual appointment.)

 

Participating artists and their contributions:

Andrea Bellu

Andrea Bellu develops her artistic works as installations: writing, drawing, taking photographs and making films. She often works together with other artists and scientists. Starting out from post-colonial, migrant and feminist perspectives, she attempts to insert gaps and disruptions into the predominant narrations of history.

From all this an intuitive, unfinished archive emerged, which the artist will investigate during her fellowship in Büchsenhausen. While traveling through Silesia, Galicia and Bukovina in 2014 and 2015, Andrea Bellu began to gather together material: pictures, conversations, landscapes, sunsets, literature. The route of travel encompassed an historical cultural sphere, in which different minorities lived alongside and with each other for centuries, without a national majority population. In many villages and towns the Jewish population constituted the biggest minority. This complex and multilayered cohabitation was put to a cruel end by German occupation and the German politics of annihilation during the Second World War.
Andrea Bellu’s prime concern is to connect the frequently recounted and described, violent history of the early 20th century to the present day, and to visualize its present, ever tangible effects and continuities.

Nachtflug – Nachrichten von Aurélia Steiner (Night Flight – Messages from Aurélia Steiner (2015)
6 postcards, double-sided, 10x15cm, black-and-white photograph, text

Quotes from:
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Night Flight
Erich Bloch, Traces
Christa Wolf, City of Angels or The Overcoat of Dr. Freud
Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina
Dawid Rubinowicz, Diary
Hubert Fichte, The Square of the Hanged
Ilse Aichinger, Bad Words

The haunted memory released by one’s found family pictures finds its materiality in a contingent flow of narration and stories on sent and absent presences.

Benjamin TIVEN

Benjamin Tiven Benjamin Tiven is an American filmmaker and writer. Recent exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Delfina Foundation, London; 1/9unosunove gallery, Rome, and Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster. Films screened at the Viennale, FIDMarseille, Rotterdam, Oberhausen, and Arsenale Cinema, Berlin. Recent publications: Scrim Sinews (Cura Books, 2015), and contributions to the journals Triple Canopy, Bidoun, and Bulletins of the Serving Library.
http://benjamintiven.com/

A Third Version of the Imaginary (2012)
Video / HD / 1.78 / stereo / color / 12:00”
Swahili with english subtitles

The film A Third Version of the Imaginary traces an encounter with the video and film library of the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation in Nairobi. We follow the station’s librarian through tightly-packed shelves of video cassettes: he is searching for a specific set of images, and must sift through the identifying paperwork from a number of tapes. As he methodically moves among the stacks, a Swahili voice-over speaks about the arrival of video technology in Kenya and its impact on the archiving of television images: video may have cheapened production, but its material expense put pressure on storage. Later, the librarian converts a basement storage closet into a makeshift cinema, to screen some recovered 16mm film material. The voice-over shifts accordingly, from video to film, and to the linguistic problem posed by the very word image in Swahili. A visual and narrative echo chamber, this video addresses video’s address of film. The material facts of these media become the aesthetic facts of the film.

Fokus Grupa

Fokus Grupa is an artist collective based in Rijeka, Croatia. Their work points to the social, economical and political frames of the art field. Their practice is collaborative and interdisciplinary, and they work across art, design and curating. Fokus Grupa concentrate on the relations between art and its public manifestations, in terms of working culture, aesthetics, and social and economic exchange values.

There Aren’t Words for What We Do or How We Feel so We Have to Make Them Up (2012)
video / Full HD / colour / sound / 14’47”
cinematography: Bojan Mrđenović, sound recording: Boris Fischer, editing: Hrvoslava Brkušić

Investigating the significance of nature for the nationalist discourse, the film There Aren’t Words for What We Do or How We Feel so We Have to Make Them Up is both political and escapist. Trough contemplation of the narrator and the imagery of national parks, the film explores the questions of representation and the notion of the “national essence.”
Fokus Grupa is taking text samples out of a variety of sources from the Croatian national anthem to nature documentaries and tourist campaigns, in order to compose the narration layer of the film. Through various topographies, from open plains to mountain peaks, the camera explores the notions of the sublime, establishing it’s (critical) relationship to romanticism, and making a full circle, all the way back to contemporary (Croatian) nationalism.

Perfect Lovers (2014)
altered ready-made, mass produced objects
2 wall clocks / dimensions: variable

Perfect Lovers is an appropriation of Felix Gonzales-Torres work with an intervention, a redesign of the front side of two clocks into pie-charts. In Torres’s work two ready-made clocks inevitably go out of sync as time passes, illustrating a painfully simple allegory of love and partnership, while at the same time making a sharp critique of the heteronormative paradigm. In the case of Fokus Grupa the work approaches both the question of time and the idea of partnership, trough an economic lens. Here, the time is less a matter of meditation and more something to be measured, divided and instrumentalized. In an attempt to represent an ideal workday, which the 19th century proletarian desired; Eight hours labor, Eight hours recreation, Eight hours rest the required time has to span two clocks. Perfect Lovers fulfil the tasks of an effective worker. The function of their union is thus one of survival, essentially an economical one.

Marina Vishmidt & Anthony Iles

Marina Vishmidt is a London-based writer occupied mainly with questions around art, labor and value. Anthony Iles is a writer of criticism and fiction based in London. Since 2009, Marina Vishmidt and Anthony Iles have been working together on a series of essays, posters and presentations expanding their common interest in the relation of artistic practices to social crisis by reflecting on the roles of machines, labor and value in capitalist reality and communist philosophy.

Ferment of Abolition (2015)
Seven Thousand Lean Years for Value (2015)
Petrified Unrest (2015)
3 posters, colour, digital print, A0

To launch their project at Büchsenhausen Anthony Iles and Marina Vishmidt have worked with designers Paul Abbott and Alessandra Kila to make three posters which form graphic approximations of ‘processed value’ gathered from their working notes and image resources: ‘Ferment of Abolition’, ‘Seven Thousand Lean Years for Value’, ‘Petrified Unrest’.