The space behind things

VERNISSAGE:  6. APRIL 2018 AB 19:00

AUSSTELLUNG: 7. - 14. APRIL 2018
ÖFFNUNGSZEITEN:  DO-SA 17:00 BIS 20:00

Mit:
Luísa Telles, Adrian Lopez, Monnier Ostermair, Filipe Lippe, Paul Glaw , Katja Pilipenko und Georg Juranek
Kuratiert von Felipe Lippe
Initiiert von Dagmar Rauwald

The human body is bombarded by informations of all kinds. How to distinguish what is relevant and significant from what is superfluous and disposable? This was the question that the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman asked himself during the last years of his long intellectual life. When invited by the Italian magazine La Repubblica Delle to write letters commenting on aspects of what the he called “liquid modernity", the sociologist wrote about topics such as iPod, Twitter, Facebook, Barack Obama, credit cards and swine influenza. Fom 2008 to 2009 few events escaped Bauman’s watchful eye, who presented brief and brilliant analyzes about contemporary life. Bauman’s ability to discover meanings behind simple acts – a cell phone call, the display of a photo on Facebook, a billboard and so on – gave us a glimpse into the complexity of events and things that surround us. All these seemingly casual and disconnected facts that reinforce the affliction and the identity of the world today.

What lies behind these things? What is reality in the age of post-truth and network overexposure? What is the difference between experienced reality and narrated reality? Dominant social groups always had the control of the episteme, the dissemination of ideas and interpretations of reality. They “have” the “truth”. Anyway, if in the recent past the media corporations held the information monopoly and shaped public opinion and we knew who (or which social class) was the storyteller, today it is a bit harder to know who is narrating what and for whom. In today's liquid modernity the power structures that construct and narrate reality through academic, scientific, artistic and media practices seem to be dissipated. It is a dubious fact that at the same time frees us from the impositions of a dominant ideological discourse and opens the doors to obscure manipulations of the real inscribed as alternative fact, fake News or post-truth. Somehow, in the limit, if everyone can tell its own truth, no one can tell the truth.

In this context in which the understanding of the events of the world and the perception of reality are blurred it becomes difficult to distinguish what is real, what is true or what is fictional, invented reality. Images, gestures, ideas, objects, words, data, voices, what does compose the chaos of the world? Art, understood as a practice of “going beyond”, a practice that reveals the unseen and the unspoken, offers a challenge to the power and to the common understanding of reality and truth. If the substratum of art is doubt and not established truths, then art is the place where things are in suspension, the place where the real is challenged. Art has the potency, therefore, to offer an enlarged experience of the real. Which one? The exhibition The Space Behind Things does not undertake to answer this ontological (and political) question around reality and truth, but to open a debate about what lies behind the multiple offerings of interpretation of reality, truth and life today.

Filipe Lippe