It’s in the ‘Can’
25 January – 25 February 2012
Open Space – Zentrum fur Kunstprojekte, Vienna, Austria
http://www.openspace-zkp.org/
It’s in the ‘Can’,
art exhibition curated by Gulsen Bal
In articulation of the creative process and what formulates the creative strategies and the creative moment of thinking differently; the editorial team of e-flux journal #26 Ñ underlines a fundamental paradox by bringing the old question “What is art?” as it “must be left open.” And this engagement emerges with a big ending statement as “art at its best does not provide answers and solutions; it creates problems.”
At all events, this reading intends to show the problematic of the practical questions with political implications that is linked with the concept such as “becoming subjects.” To that extent, using Rancière’s term of “creating concepts”, yet following the connection between hegemony and micropolitics which accounts, in part, for his insistence on the articulation of the ‘regimes’ of art in terms of the productions of subjects, we can characterise this as a highly significant transformation in its manifold modalities.
However in the present context, it is equally important to understand “the hegemony and micropolitics are not mutually exclusive perspectives, but instead refer to one another.” This aspect touches on an almost paradoxical complication of this argument which a politics can emerge, both theoretically and practically. Also, from there, we need to return to the possibilities of ‘thinking the political’ in which what constitutes the political domain, to what and where is ‘the political subject.’
I would say these relational processes arise here to explore all modes of representation as well as all paths of production, in which the possible is engendered. This causes us to explore the uneasy relations and interdependencies of forces to propagate in the eventualities as it appears, to engage in rethinking of identifying a specific conjunction of the new outlines to whatever microscale possible. Where, then, do the ‘politics of art’ rest in this obvious paradox?
In this stance, the critical moments of a plurality of questions become countenance, where the question of the political opens up within the creative practice. This sets new kinds of creative connections while introducing an experimental dynamic in which the current relational powers to be problematised, in which “art becomes aware of the limits of its power, it is pushed toward a new political commitment by the weakening of politics itself.” This signals, for me, the possibility of a new type of politics centered in the question of what is in the ‘can’?
Participating Artists: Heba Amin, Yane Calovski, Sanja Ivekovic, Christine Schoerkhuber, Kamen Stoyanov
