Subversive Praktiken

Description

Stuttgart, Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, 30-05-2009, 02-08-2009. - Groepstentoonstelling onderzoekt subversieve experimentele en conceptuele kunstpraktijken die zich vanaf de jaren '60 tot de jaren '80 ontwikkelden onder invloed van militaire en communistische regimes in Europa en Zuid-Amerika. - Subversive Practices devotes itself to experimental and conceptual art practices that had established between the nineteen-sixties and eighties in Europe and South America under the influence of military dictatorships and communist regimes. The exhibition's nine sections focus on various contexts and strategies of artistic production along with their positioning vis-à-vis political and cultural repression in the GDR, Hungary, Romania, the Soviet Union, Spain, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, and Peru. Of equal concern here are both the particularities of and the relations between the different temporal and local environments. The exhibition undertakes the experiment of a shifted cartography and an extended understanding of conceptual art, which has become established well beyond the Anglo-American canon. In this respect, the related interdisciplinary, collaborative, and sociopolitical potentials are particularly emphasized-that is, the paradigm shifts between visual arts, politics, society, sciences, architecture, design, mass media, literature, dance, theater, activism, and so forth, which have been educed by these potentials. Furthermore, the focus is on artistic practices that not only radically question the conventional concept of art, the institutions, and the relationship between art and public, but that have, at the same time, subversively thwarted structures of censorship and opposed the existing systems of power. Here, body, language, and public space represent the pivotal instruments, of resistance, symbolic and performative in equal measure. The appropriation of media and distribution channels-especially the postal service-has in turn played a distinctive role in the establishment of the widely ramified networks between (Eastern) Europe and Latin America. In lieu of conceptualizing a comprehensive and homogenized discourse, the exhibition reflects specific questions and problems. The curators each developed individual presentational models for their respective exhibition section. In different ways they approach to the problem in presenting ephemeral, time- and location-specific art forms. Thus, the exhibition can be experienced also on a formal level as a polyphonic parcours, a multidimensional cartography.