ECONOMY has opened at Stills (Edinburgh) and CCA (Glasgow) Scotland and is on view Saturday 19 January – Sunday 21 April 2013.
Mitra Tabrizian, City, London, 2008 (2008). Courtesy of ProjectB.
ECONOMY draws together a small selection of the many artists across the globe whose work communicates the feeling that society is undergoing a momentous transformation. Whether dealing with access to housing, everyday working conditions, sexuality or the environment, such work is shot through with the sense that something is changing. The question is: what? The two exhibitions at the centre of the ECONOMY project offer a singular answer to this question: what is changing is our relationship to the economy as a necessary response to the economy’s own transformation. In the unforgettable vision of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, all that is solid melts into air – yet again. The end of the Cold War, symbolically represented by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, generated a number of ‘turns’ in the context of contemporary art: turns to collectivism, to the making of archives, to social bonds, relations and communities, to labour, to biopolitics and the document, to struggle. This restless quest for the right ‘tag’ has been one way of saying that contemporary art is, finally, becoming new as it focuses its efforts on the exploration of the material conditions that make reality what it is.
ECONOMY is curated by Kirsten Lloyd and Angela Dimitrakaki
Venues:
Stills www.stills.org
23 Cockburn Street
Edinburgh EH1 1BP
Saturday 19 January – Sunday 21 April 2013 / Monday – Sunday / 11am – 6pm / FREE
CCA www.cca-glasgow.com
350 Sauchiehall Street
Glasgow G2 3JD
Saturday 26 January – Sunday 23 March 2013 / Tuesday – Saturday / 11am – 6pm / FREE