[echo] Art program within the conference in L ü neburg: Everything will be fine

[Bahari Ndogo]

Everything will be fine
Art Program in the framework of the ESA Arts Conference

March 27th to April 15th 2007, Lüneburg


Featuring three art exhibitions, events and performances, the Art  Program
Everything will be fine focuses on the role of art as a research practice
exchanging with the search process of sustainability.

Featuring: 
Roman Ondak (Slovakia)
David Haley (UK)
Aviva Rahmani (USA)
Hans Abbing (Netherlands)
Jokinen (Germany)
Eleonore Straub (Germany)
Karen Heald (UK)
Personal Cinema (Greece)
Jane Marsching (USA)
the students of the CCC-Program of the Geneva art academy (Switzerland)
Pascal de Lavergne (France)
Karen Frostig (USA)
Aziz Baako (Ghana)

Curated by Sacha Kagan (ESA Arts organizing committee) and Bettina
Steinbrügge (Halle für Kunst).


Locations:  

Halle für Kunst Lüneburg :
Reichenbachstr. 2, Lüneburg
Wednesday to Sunday: 14:00-18:00

Kunstraum der Universität Lüneburg :
Scharnhorststr.1, Halle 25, Lüneburg
Thursday to Saturday: 16:00-19:00 and also Wednesday March 28th
(14:00-18:00) and Sunday April 1st (11:00-15:00)

A posters exhibition is taking place on the ESA Arts conference location
during the conference, and in the lobby of the central University library
(campus Scharnhorststr.) from April 3rd onwards.

The Art Program Everything will be fine is co-organized by the organizing
committee of the ESA Arts conference and by the Halle für Kunst Lüneburg.
The posters exhibition receives also the support of Studentenwerk
Braunschweig.

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Special art program at the ESA Arts Conference:

On the week of the ESA Art Conference, a series of special events will be
programmed at various locations in Lüneburg with paper presentations,
performances and visits to the art exhibitions. See the following program
page for details.

 

Special Art Program


Tuesday, March 27th

18:00    Opening of the exhibition at the Halle für Kunst
    Performance-installation by 2 students of The destiny of species: the
writing on the wall (David Haley)
            Place: Halle fuer Kunst Lüneburg (Reichenbachstr. 2)


Saturday, March 31st

19:00     Performance by David Haley: Sometimes Making Art Can Be Difficult
            Place: Halle fuer Kunst Lüneburg (Reichenbachstr. 2)


Sunday, April 1st

09:30 ­ 10:00    Projection: Il y a bien quelqu¹un quelque part (Pascal de
Lavergne)
Place: Conference location (campus Rotes Feld, room xxxx)

10:00 ­ 11:30    Presentations: Eleonore Straub; Jokinen; Siamak G.
Shahneshin
Visit: Posters from the Shrinkage Awards (Shahneshin Foundation), from the
CCC program (Geneva art academy) and from Jane Marsching¹s Arctic Listening
Post
Place: Conference location (campus Rotes Feld, room xxxx)

11:30 ­ 12: 15    Coffee Break and Travel to Kunstraum (campus
Scharnhorststr.)

12:15 ­ 13:00    Performance by Aziz Baako: Tears of the dead and dying
specie
    Presentation and visit of exhibition
    Place: Kunstraum and campus Scharnhorststr.


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 Everything will be fine: the exhibitions


With Everything will be fine, an exchange platform is open between
sustainability as a change process and art as social inquiry. While the
exhibition at the Halle für Kunst deals with the macro-social field of the
political, the exhibition at the Kunstraum operates a close-up on the
micro-social level of the western human being:


At the Halle für Kunst

The exhibition at the Halle für Kunst of Lüneburg engages into some of the
difficult political, social and ecological challenges that characterize the
macro-social level of globalization.

In the face of the challenges of globalization: an ethics of sustainability

Since 9/11, the event horizon is acutely tainted by the specter of armed
conflict. However, the most recent outbursts of war have their breeding
ground in a history of violence with the European battleground of the
Balkans, the Shoah, the Israel/Palestine conflict and the colonial past of
Europe. The geopolitical context is but only one of the major difficulties
faced in the age of globalization: The global ecological crisis is another
major challenge, no less threatening to the very existence of humanity, that
is being addressed specifically by the exhibition Everything will be fine.
Facing the global reality of unsustainability, the exhibition at the Halle
für Kunst takes a definitely ethical perspective. We call forward a return
to ethics in art, based more specifically on the search for an ethics of
sustainability. Such a movement is already starting to roll and gaining
visibility in the world of contemporary art, e.g. with the exhibition Beyond
Green: towards a sustainable art that took place at the Smart museum in
Chicago in 2005 and the "sustainability and contemporary art² symposium held
in Budapest at the Central European University in 2006.

An ethics of sustainability, if it can be summarized in only one sentence,
would point at the following imperative: It calls forward a way of life that
does not threaten other ways of life.

Besides, Sustainability as a change process provides artists with a
laboratory for intervention in society. The concept of sustainability draws
an exploratory space for integrated and comprehensive social change, towards
more economic and social justice, more peaceful coexistence (with
intercultural interaction and gender equality) and towards a human system
that manages its relationships to its environment in a more harmonious way:
i.e. a system that adapts to its environment instead of forcing its
environment to adapt to itself. Sustainability allows to conceptualize human
society as a complex "auto-eco-organisation² (Edgar Morin).
If it invokes ethics, the change process also implies learning a new way to
apprehend reality and understand inter-relations between phenomena from a
wide array of domains. It involves training one's eye to see the
higher-leverage points in complex systems and learning skills of a new kind
for westerners, the skills of a new culture of thought often labeled as
'systems thinking'.

The inquiries of the selected artists address three major issues: the
culture of war, the ecological crisis and contemporary socialities. These
major issues have to be addressed, in order to unearth the parameters of the
contemporary culture of unsustainability and to open the path for an ethical
search process of sustainability.


The culture of war

The American artist Karen Frostig carries out a research that touches upon
her private history, on the traces of her Austrian Jewish parents, victims
of the Shoah and of collective memories. Primal Fear, the work presented at
the Halle für Kunst, highlights the difficulties of the Israel-Palestine
peace process, tainted with intricate contradictions and with the ghosts of
colonialism and the Shoah.
Another highly complex conflict zone has left a heavy mark on the past
century and raised the attention of European artists: The making of Balkan
Wars: The Game, edited by the group 'Personal Cinema', subverts the medium
of the war computer-game in order to document and analyze the past, present
and future of the Balkanic identity in its interdependence with Europe and
the USA. 
With the installation afrika-hamburg.de, the Hamburg-based artist Jokinen
exposes the colonial history of the German harbor through the case-study of
the turbulent life of a colonial monument. This work reveals the uneasy and
hypocritical relationship of the city with its own past.


The ecological crisis

With the poem and performance-installation The Destiny of Species: The
Writing on the Wall, David Haley intends "to generate poetic dialogues that
resonate as creative interventions in pursuit of aesthetic diversity to
develop communities of inquiry for an eco-centric culture [...] I perceive
our ability to survive climate change as the enactment of an evolutionary
narrative.² The performance will take place on the first day of the
exhibition (March 27th, starting at 16:00): two volunteering (male & female)
students, with ladders and drawing materials, will draw the poem on the
wall, from a projection.
David Haley also explores the working methodologies of the ecological artist
in his performance Sometimes Making Art Can Be Difficult (performed at the
Halle für Kunst on March 31st 2007 at 19:00).
Aviva Rahmani, in The making of the salt marsh, documents her concrete land
reclamation practice as an eco-artist engaged in long-term interdisciplinary
projects for effective change processes towards environmental
sustainability. 


Contemporary socialities

With Il y a bien quelqu'un quelquepart ('there ought to be someone
somewhere'), Pascal de Lavergne provides a quasi-sociological analysis of
the fragmented and mediated sensibilities of contemporary interpersonal
relationships, more specifically of the love-seeking practices of French
women on Internet. His work subtly highlights some of the troublesome
characteristics of these web-based socialities and of the tunnel-vision of
individualism and consumerism.
Roman Ondak, in his Announcement, questions the significance of rituals of
solidarity, supposed to mark the collective adhesion to common values. In
this paradoxical call to non-action, the interventionist artist points at
the vacuity of many 'awareness-raising' campaigns of little consequences. An
ethics of sustainability definitely implies more than such a minimum level
of engagement.
With its direct intervention upon the visitor of the exhibition,
Announcement also fosters individual reflexivity. This artwork is to be
found back in the other exhibition space, at the Kunstraum of the University
of Lüneburg, together with another selection of works addressing western
culture at a more micro-social level .


At the Kunstraum

The exhibition confronts several analyzes of individual behavior
characterizing western lifestyles.
It offers examples of artistic inquiry as a form of research that comes
close to the practice of social sciences.
It reveals the western culture of individualism as a culture of
unsustainability.

Art as social inquiry

Art as social inquiry explores, analyzes, and experiments on social reality
with an approach that can combine insights and methods from the social
sciences with specific tools and sensibilities more traditionally associated
to the 'more than rational' potential of artistic work.
For now more than half a century, the fields of art and science have
repeatedly come to realize that they do have indeed much in common:
Sociological inquiry (Latour) as well as epistemology (Feyerabend, Mc
Closkey) have shown repeatedly how, in the working processes of science,
intuitive processes, ad hoc discourse, lateral thinking and rhetorics are
playing an active and helpful part.
In parallel, the traditionally romantic conception of artistic work as a
shamanic process of inspiration has been repeatedly balanced by artistic
practices and discourses highlighting the uses  that can be made of the
social sciences and/or of 'hard' sciences and technologies by artists. The
integration of artists like John Cage in the cybernetic discourse and the
'art and technology' movement from the 1950's onwards, have demonstrated the
potentials of art/science interdisciplinarity.  The social critique of Hans
Haacke and the interventions of Wochenklausur in more recent decades clearly
exemplify a sociologically-supported research process integrated in the
artistic inquiry.

A study of the Western individual

Art as inquiry can play the role of an innovative and resourceful partner
for the social sciences. The artists presented in the Kunstraum build upon
this potential. Their inquiries elaborate a portrait of the western
individual subject where empathic understanding allows a deeper unveiling of
embodied social structures, fabricated representations and communicative
interactions supporting a culture of unsustainability. As Europe
increasingly turns into a fortress of wealth, neither individualism nor its
social networks can wipe out the rampant malaise generated by the
confrontation to the realities of globalization.

To understand the micro-sociological level of western culture, some artists
are developing inter- or multidisciplinary research practices.
Interdisciplinary is being explored by Dr Jenny Hislop, Karen Heald and
Chris Bird-Jones in their search for a sociology of the intimate space of
sleep (Pillow), while embodied multidisciplinarity characterizes the work of
Prof Hans Abbing, alternating his studio practice with periods of research
on the sociology and economy of the arts.

Jokinen's photographic survey of a border-soldiers house from the cold war
era (Grenzsoldatenhaus) reanimates the imaginary landscape of the western
way of life as it was  possibly experienced by a soviet soldier. The dream
of a western lifestyle of consumption and leisure haunts the walls of the
empty vestige. As the echo of this frustrated dream vanishes on the eastern
European border, it resonates louder than ever on its southern front.

With Clematis, Eleonore Straub draws the proliferating net and grid of the
communicative intersubjectivity characterizing the western polity where the
citizen attempts at reconstructing significance. The technological
infrastructure of a so-called network society also comes here back to the
surface, revealing how the communication network is bringing confusion and
fragmentation to the individual perception of social reality.

Leaving the western individual and turning to the south, the poetic
performance of Aziz Baako (Tears of the dead and dying specie, performed at
the Kunstraum on April 1st 2007 at 12:15) expresses the personal traces and
traumas left by colonialism, war, dictatorships, migrations and other
difficulties of the African continent.

Roman Ondak's Announcement works as a live social experiment targeting the
visitor of the exhibition in his or her immediate behavior and triggering
individual reflexivity. The announcement releases personal memories evoking
uneasiness, inaction, guilt. It both reveals to some visitors their habits
of wait-and-see policy and questions the commemorative agitation of others.


Posters at the conference location

The posters exhibition presents a selection of art and graphic design
practices as proactive discourses advancing an ethics of sustainability (CCC
posters), mobilizing awareness on climate change (Jane Marsching) and
proposing particular understandings of sustainability (Shrinkage Awards
posters).

The selection of posters from the students at the Postgraduate Study
Programme CCC - Critical Curatorial Cybermedia, Geneva University of Art and
Design" (produced in January 2007 for a residence at the Halle für Kunst of
Lüneburg as part of the Crosskicks program organized by the ADKV) points at
a necessary dimension of an ethics of sustainability, acknowledging
complexity and implying a continuous process of systemic self-criticism on
the part of the social group and of the individual. The ethics of
self-criticism also applies of course to the artist and to the art world.
The CCC students with their posters are indeed pursuing such an ethical
search process, building a critical reflexivity on art schools and the art
market. Their work testifies that the Institutional Critique movement has
found a new generation of sociologically-literate artists, whose work can
contribute significantly to a new ethical turn in the world of contemporary
art.

The posters from the American artist Jane Marsching document the
multidisciplinary projects she is conducting about representations of
climate change (Arctic Listening Post, from 2005 to 2009). In 2005, Jane
Marsching carried out Deep North, a virtual residency to the Noth Pole with
"research, information, ruminations, analogic connections, and wondering on
the cultural imaginary of the north pole and deep arctic². In the
photo-montages Arctic Then, she proposes "narrative tableaux of vaudevillian
performers engaged in acts of questing, wonder, and exploration, on the edge
of the impossible, on a line between then as past and then as future². In
Climate Commons, she organizes an online interdiciplinary conversation about
the arctic and climate change: "I don¹t make work about climate change by
speaking objectively about data, instead I take the data and place it into a
context that we all understand, in my case the history of exploration,
theater, humor, and wonder. [...] The question facing us now is how to take
the overwhelming loads of data about climate change, make sense of them in
our worlds, and then effect transformation. Art falls into the making sense
and effecting transformation, right after it partners in this case with the
essential science.²

The selected posters from the Shrinkage awards of the Shahneshin Foundation
communicates around the notion of 'shrinkage' as a proposed alternative to
the systematic use of the concept of sustainability. According to the
Shahneshin Foundation: "We have built a culture bubble, an environ bubble,
where mindsets are the extra-, the mega-, the over-cultures. So to say,
"BIGNESS is good." The challenge today is to deflate the bubble before it
bursts. The most vulnerable sector may be the environ in the extended sense
of the word. The basic point of shrinkage is that sooner or later our
principle premises concerning growth and expansion must be urgently revised
and reassessed. ²


Sacha Kagan