Preserved Myself 2 at the Imaginary Republic, Kunsthall 3.14, Bergen
The Imaginary Republic | 18.10. – 16.12.2018 | Kunsthall 3.14, Bergen, Norway
Tatiana Fiodorova | Brandon LaBelle / Octavio Camargo | Sala-manca group | Joulia Strauss
Curator: Brandon Labelle
https://www.kunsthall314.art/upcoming
An audio guide by Sala-amnca.
The Imaginary Republic looks at questions of public life and civic culture in today’s globally fraught environment. It questions ongoing social and political unrest and how this has led to an intensification of grass-roots initiatives, artistic activism, and practices of commoning. In particular, the project considers the creative expressions and dissident imaginaries of contemporary political subjectivity.
The exhibition features participating artists whose works and practices engage with communities of struggle, transitional zones and the drive of autonomous cultures. It brings into play forms and fictions by which emergent social configurations work as solidarity machines. As such, it sets out to dialogue with what Stavros Stavrides calls “communities in movement”. These act as expressions of social thresholds, where borders function less as fortifications and more as points of contact with others. Communities in movement suggest new lines of collective power and imagination by traversing and upsetting demarcations of the managed self. Such configurations of sociality may rework patterns of neoliberal life described by Isabell Lorey as “governing through insecurity”. Instead, they bring forward a culture of co-existence and poetic world making that often hovers in the gaps of political life. The works presented in the exhibition dialogue with these larger issues and realities, articulating fragile meetings and temporary dwellings, imaginary journeys and the creative resistances found in small gestures of care. As such, they document and point toward ways of figuring an art of survival.
Preserved Myself 1 at the Mamuta Art and Research Center, Design Week
