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OPEN SPACE | exhibition announcement: Demanding the Impossible at Unexpected Turns

In a world, where the impossible seems possible, when something that has been repressed for a long time, steps out of the unconscious and seems to get radicalised through the extreme right, artists are more than ever prompted to dedicate themselves to a future, where anti-intellectualism is at stake and critical thinking no longer accepted. What will come after Trump, Brexit and ISIS? Which forms of radicalisation are constituted and how has our perspective on a liberal, open society changed? How can artists reclaim this open society and which conflicts arise along economic, technological and medical progress, which makes us want to live longer but prevents us from thinking critically?

Artists are in constant need of demanding new models of gauging how the world can be seen from a different perspective than the one, which is determined, by dominant models of power, politics or religious beliefs. The latter often cause unexpected turns that shift societies into different directions, which might not even be accepted by a majority of voters and/or the population. Ever again, societies and certain population groups are trapped in a “state of exception”, as Giorgio Agamben put it in 2005. This state of exception, however, has continued to the present day and rather turned into a “state of emergency, which might not be overcome in a near future.

The artists whom are taking part in the exhibition tackle these questions implicitly and try to generate various models, which claim for a different status quo to open up new possibilities and areas of thought at the prelude to further urgent hopeless transformations and the voids that carry certain disappearances within unexpected turns.

Supported by:

Stadtteilkultur, Interkulturalität und Internationale Angelegenheiten
Kulturabteilung der Stadt Wien
Magistratsabteilung 7 – Bildende Kunst

3 – 27 October 2017

PROJECT CURATORS: Gülsen Bal & Walter Seidl

Participating artists:
Zanny Begg & Oliver Ressler
VALIE EXPORT
Adela JušiĆ
Thaer Maarouf
Cengiz Tekin

Website: http://www.openspace-zkp.org

Cengiz Tekin, Normalization, C-print, 90 x 120 cm (2009)