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120115: Secession: Chto Delat Time capsule. Artistic reports about catastrophe and utopia
Secession: Chto Delat
Time capsule. Artistic reports about catastrophe and utopia
21.11.2014 – 25.01.2015
Back to the future or: The set theory of the community
By Maren Richter
The Russian collective, Chto Delat, is known for its involvement in complex community constituent themes to solicit emancipatory fields of action, political as well as artistic, local as well as global.
To which extent this presents a tool for changes, respectively which aesthetic channels this demands, has been repeated over the course of eleven years, : interventionalistic, actionistic, participative, performative, theatrically, theoretically, cinematically or sculpturally.
The centre of the Secession's exhibition "Time Capsule. Artistic reports about catastrophe and utopia" is presented in a closely spaced staging of new works. This is flanked by a comprehensive documentation of its effect. Video clips, posters, newspapers all come together in a sort of staged re-production in miniature form.
However, this part should not necessarily be read retrospectively. The actualization of the individual work belongs far more to the self-conception of the artistic practice - in the conviction that the altercation with archive and historisation are fundaments of political and artistic life.
Already in the summer of 2014, the group lead a debate on ideologised memory based on the Russian Memorial on the Schwarzenbergplatz, which is now experiencing a continuation with associative strands and cross references in the main room. Accordingly, Chto Delat has positioned themselves there as chroniclers in the sense of Walter Benjamin's critique of historic materialism which is directed against history as a static administrative picture and directs itself towards an 'historic truth' apparently contained in it – whereby "catastrophe", as well as "utopia" in the title can be understood in several dialectic variations.
The code for this is the "Time capsule" standing on the podium with secret messages to the future. It denotes the counter model to the linear time space axis and thus the utopian moment which is surrounded by a landscape constructed out of over-dimensional cardboard tableaus of current media pictures of Ebola victims, IS fighters, activists on the Kiev Maidan square and an overwhelming, zombie-like torso.
The four-channel video installation, The Excluded. In a Moment of Danger, opens up in the entrance area behind the theatrical presentation; no definite, positive picture, however, but one which offers here as well as there - from the point of view of the repressive, nationalistic Putin administration – incipient stages in the burgeoning atmosphere of the Cold War, and demonstrates the helplessness or powerlessness of the individual to counteract it.
In 12 episodes, together with students from their "School for Dedicated Art, founded in St. Petersburg in 2013, Chto Delat spans a bridge which gets by with few simple, yet highly symbolic moveable pieces of scenery which impressively presents an oppressive history about Russian past and present.
Secession
1010 Vienna, Friedrichstrasse 12
Tel: +43 1 587 53 07
Fax: +43 1 587 53 07-34
http://www.secession.at
Opening hours: Tue - Sat 10-18, Sun 10-16
Mehr Texte von translated and summarized by: Liz Wollner-Grandville
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120115
Secession
1010 Wien, Friedrichstrasse 12
Tel: +43 1 587 53 07, Fax: +43 1 587 53 07-34
Email: office@secession.at
http://www.secession.at
Öffnungszeiten: Di-So 14-18 h
Secession
1010 Wien, Friedrichstrasse 12
Tel: +43 1 587 53 07, Fax: +43 1 587 53 07-34
Email: office@secession.at
http://www.secession.at
Öffnungszeiten: Di-So 14-18 h
