Antonis Pittas : Road to Victory

Description

Tent. Hordaland, Hordaland Kunstsenter, 27-01-2017, 09-04-2017. - Monografie documenteert een site specific installatie van de Griekse kunstenaar Antonis Pittas. Bevat tevens zaaloverzichten van het project in Het Oog in het Van Abbemuseum, 02-03-2010, 27-06-2010. - In revisiting this moment in the history of exhibitions, Pittas draws our attention to the embedding of propaganda elements in artistic display conventions, ranging from the Russian Avant-garde to the contemporary moment. Bringing into constellation a history of affect and abstraction in the exhibition space, the “Road to Victory” project brings together archival fragments, spatial transformations, new sculptural works, and textual contributions by a host of acclaimed authors. Each component is integral to the entire project, and intentionally sustains the suggested relationships between economic, historical, political and aesthetic trajectories. Pittas creates context-sensitive spatial installations and objects, which are informed by architecture, politics, art-historical references, the performative aspects of installation art and its social dynamics. In Road to Victory he transforms Hordaland Kunstsenter’s gallery space into a field of black surfaces, objects, sculptures and text works that draw the exhibition visitor into a tactile system in which value, performativity and material history are contested. Pittas reminds us that our sensory vocabularies are infused by ideology; they are not innocent. Politics lives in the matter of art, in its ability to mean, even as aesthetic and artistic tastes are inevitably influenced by political feelings.