PUSHING THE ELASTIC CUBE – Mobile by Circumstance

photos: Sofia Dona (left), Juan Manuel Magan

video / installation / sound / performance / photographie

Opening: Friday, 12th March / 7 pm
Artist talk with Mario Rizzi: Friday, 12th March / 8 pm
Exhibition: 13th March - 10th April
Closing: Saturday, 10th April / 7 pm

Artist talk with Mario Rizzi
Mario Rizzi's work is about storytelling, about documenting and re-enacting, about borders and engagement, rooting and uprooting, diversity and tolerance, about reality miming fiction, about finding exceptional events behind the stories of ordinary people, about utopias and prosaic globalization, about being without a land or "below the visa line", about making visible invisible forces, undisclosed emotions or unsaid memories.

During the talk, Angeliki Makri will temporarily close shop by –œknitting the door shut–. Separating those inside from those outside with a network made of red ribbon - a pair of scissors for –œemergencies– will be displayed prominently by the door - as well as for –œcutting the red ribbon/tape– it temporarily marks the public realm by commenting and commemorating the transition from –œinside– to –œoutside– the white cube in a both ironic and celebratory way.

Exhibition
13 artists –œin transit– from Canada, the USA, Greece, Chile, Mexico, P.R. China and Germany from the postgraduate program Public Arts and New Artistic Strategies at the Bauhaus University will exhibit work based on the idea of memory and the dissolution of the White Cube. The White Cube can be considered a monumentalized term from a globalized Eurocentric perspective on contemporary art. As public artists, the participants have explored the elasticity of the term's edges, testing for abstract potential, flexibility, and mobility.

arttransponder is an artists association that has run an project space for five years on the heavily gentrified Brunnenstraße and is currently facing the space's closing in June. In both a literal and a metaphorical sense, arttransponder, which has focused on participatory projects at the interface to other disciplines, can be seen as consciously working inside and outside the White Cube, testing and redefining its boundaries, while reflecting on institutional power of defining art and its value.

This project was developed in relation to the question of how an art space might continue after it is (re)moved from its precarious position within existing architectural structures in a rapidly transforming urban environment: as an idea, a concept, or actual mobile space, possibly floating, disembodied, into the future -

text: Lisa Glauer


Participants: Xinlang Guo, Sofia Dona, Carly Schmitt, Eriphyli Veneri, Angeliki Makri, Natalia Matta, Rosa van Goudoever, Yvonne Morales, Johannes Abendroth

Hosting: The Process Institute: How to exist? Zoe Kreye, Irene Izquierdo, Carlos Léon-Xjimenez, Catherine Grau

Fotos: Process Institute

In the advents of arttransponder closing its space and Process Institute founding itself as an artist collective without a permanent space, we enter a common ground of questioning. If temporality and mobility are the contemporary answer to sustain culture, we need to initiate an invested exploration of the possibilities of this phenomenon. The Process Institute: How to exist? poses concrete questions of how to parasite spaces, collaborate with other institutions, and what kind of infrastructures are needed in art-production, as well as exploring the deeper issues such as adaptation, appropriation, migration, and how to remain rooted while mobile. For the 4-week duration Process Institute used the arttransponder space as an office to establish its common mission in a conscious approach to collaboration. Networks of working structures with similar approaches were explored through a series of interviews and an archive of the results was compiled. The mobile office was developed and tested as a mobile research platform for an active, grass-roots artistic practice. Our main aim is to use this platform for investigations, project developments, public space appropriations and insertion into specific contexts relating community, everyday living, social and spatial possibilities, and fostering public creativity. The results of how to exist?, our ongoing process and future projects can be followed here.

Text: Process Institute

kuratiert von Lisa Glauer