A Thousand Endless Tales – Dancing the Line of Flight
(Story Telling)

 

Participating artists: Tal Adler (IL / AT), Oreet Ashery (UK), Amélie Brisson-Darveau (CA / CH), Shirin Damerji (DE), Discoteca Flaming Star (DE / ES), huber.huber (CH), Lena Huber (CH), Sarah Jäger (CH), Brigitta Kuster (CH / DE), Joanna Lombard (SE), Krzysztof Miękus (PL), Cora Piantoni (DE / CH), Christian Ratti (CH), Roee Rosen (IL), Jenny Rova (SE / CH), Jana Štěpánová & Gabriela Kontra (CZ), Lisa Schiess (CH), Gisèle Schindler (CH), Riikka Tauriainen (FI / CH), Rebecca Ann Tess (DE).

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This site is currently under construction, and some of the pages may look a bit raw, but improving by the day. Please have a look around, and visit us again soon! (last updated: 2010-10-09)

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contact: sevo(at)kein.org

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a group show curated by Dimitrina Sevova

at White Space | Raum für aktuelle Kunst, Militärstrasse 76 (backyard, entrance via Kanonengasse), 8004 Zürich

1 October - 21 November 2010

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A Thousand Endless Tales – Dancing the Line of Flight (Story Telling) is an group thematic show in two chapters curated by Dimitrina Sevova, focusing on a diversity of artistic positions from different cultural backgrounds, taking place from 1 October to 21 November 2010 at White Space | Raum für aktuelle Kunst, Militärstrasse 76 (backyard, entrance via Kanonengasse), 8004 Zürich.

1 October - 21 November 2010

Opening of Chapter 1: Friday, 1 October 2010, 19h00
Opening of Chapter 2: Friday, 29 October 2010, 19h00
Closing Event: Sunday, 21 November 2010

Opening hours: Wed: 14h00-20h00; Thu: 14h00-18h00; Fri: 14h00-18h00; Sat: 16h00-18h00

Lectures on Story Telling and artist talks on Saturday, 2 October and Saturday, 30 October, 14h00 at White Space. Details to be announced.

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Curatorial Statement

The exhibition takes a look at various forms of reflection on aesthetic possibilities and political implications of individual stories of ordinary people in relation to society at large. The basic voices are set up by artists invited do develop a broad spectrum of possible approaches and artistic languages, a polyphony of sounds inherent to their different cultural and xxx x xxxxxxxx xxxx political backgrounds and age differences, grounded in their daily art practices directed at the social space, rebelling against clean forms and normative channels in bursts of emotional expression. A Thousand Endless Tales – Dancing the Line of Flight (Story Telling) merges forms of living knowledge, opens a range of possible social realities in an infinite space where “story becomes form.” It is concerned with stories that fall out of the corpus of the total library; with the noisy channels, especially the so-called “unscientific” languages, intractable, apocryphal versions, alogisms, dialects… It follows those rocks falling off the tower into a thousand pieces, the bugs and errors that break up the polished surface, in stories murmured outside the language of dominance, those stories whose peak gets broken, the plateaus opening up xxx xx xxxx xxxx the space to the horizon beyond great narratives, in small details, characters, traces carrying the stamp of superstition, dirty words, nonsense, frenzy, troublemaking, riot.

The “oral tradition” is an instrument of alternative production of knowledge based on free distribution, collective production, guerrilla communication, tactical media interventions, able to convey the art message beyond the art space itself. Complicity determines the relation between the story teller and the listener, bathed in uncertainty and xx xx xx xxx xxx xxxx unpredictability. Paraphrasing Roland Barthes, we can speak of the “pleasure of speaking” and the “pleasure of listening.” The distribution of roles, dominant and obedient, is not as clear as it might seem. The speaker cannot be identified as active, and the listener as passive. Seduction is a two-way street. A dependency aptly described by Elizabeth Wright in a discussion of Lacan: “There is a structure of narrators who pass the story on, a mirror-maze of glances in which they and the reader become enclosed. The very fact that I get drawn into this structure proves that the text desires me and that I desire it.”

Telling stories provides a variety of devices of interaction, of reasons for interaction, different levels at which spectators can enter into art. The hegemony of the visual and of observation dissolves into diverse typologies. Putting the observer in a dual role of both observer and observed, the exhibition looks at the viewer's practice of identity-making in a condensed understanding of the other and of the self, outside the well-defined discursive frameworks controlled by the “precise” languages of science, history, institutions, where the borders are woven into one common fabric, distinctions of genre and classifications between art and science, documentary and fiction xx xx xxxxx xxx fade out, where we have no need to unify the translation and the mix of cultural codes in a globalized world, translations, transmissions from one language to another, of new feelings, habits, relations, bendings. We are interested in the xx xx xx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxx place where difference, variety and diversion are created, in how storytellers construct reality, public space, personal desires, the individual and the collective, economic and social dimensions.

(Dimitrina Sevova)

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The exhibition is taking place at:

White Space // Office for Curating / Art / Theory
Programming: Dorothee Richter, Siri Peyer
Militärstrasse 76
CH - 8004 Zürich
www.whitespace.ch

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Additional support by:

pro helvetia warsaw   iaspis

freymond-guth   code flow

German Embassy Berne

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Special thanks to all participating artists, to Dorothee Richter, Siri Peyer, Klaus Schönberger, Jean-Claude Freymond-Guth, Cora Piantoni, Jenny Rova and Alain Kessi.

Website design, programming and hosting by code flow

Chapter 1

1-24 October 2010

Opening: Friday, 1 October 2010, 19h00

Tal Adler, Shirin Damerji, Discoteca Flaming Star, huber.huber, Lena Huber, Joanna Lombard, Cora Piantoni, Christian Ratti, Roee Rosen, Jana Štěpánová & Gabriela Kontra, Lisa Schiess, Riikka Tauriainen, Rebecca Ann Tess.

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Chapter 2

30 October-21 November 2010

Opening: Friday, 29 October 2010, 19h00

Oreet Ashery, Amélie Brisson-Darveau, Discoteca Flaming Star, Lena Huber, Sarah Jäger, Brigitta Kuster, Krzysztof Miękus, Cora Piantoni, Roee Rosen, Jenny Rova, Gisèle Schindler, Riikka Tauriainen, Rebecca Ann Tess.

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Project Description

The exhibition brings together a group of artists who have taken a long-term and consistent narrative approach in their work. The exhibition strategy is based on a new “pedagogy of display” reflected in a dysfunctional architecture in the exhibition space, based on furniture of everyday use which serve as a common structure involving the different works in a dialog and thus building a larger narrative in which the different stories are interweaving into a common fabric of various media and artistic languages.

Over the eight weeks of the exhibition, 20 artistic positions are represented in two chapters of about four weeks each. The common architecture is being developed in collaboration with the artists and serves as an interface between the works and between the two chapters, and as a critical display structure undermines the White-Cube character of the exhibition space. The architectural modules are recombined for the second chapter. They offer a visual and conceptual continuity between the chapters and involve the visitors by opening a space for public discussions and allowing their participation. They allow visitors to touch, think, question instead of just looking at works hung on the wall or installed in the space. This allows us to explore the social dimension of artistic approaches as well as approaches to making exhibitions.

(Dimitrina Sevova)

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Architecture

We start out with the idea that every architecture is a conquest and appropriation defining certain rules, imposing an interface to the communication of a network of artists working in close collaboration. The question we pose ourselves is how to elaborate such a structure containing a “potentially subversive” power going beyond the space-time restrictions and the institution of strict rules, shaping new models for fostering and displaying art, a spatial and conceptual framework giving space to the diversity of artistic expressions and art practices. Telling Stories as a common interface of the exhibition, a process of exchange and mutual influence, underlining the collaborative nature of the work both among the artists and with the position of the curator as a collaborator. Building a Ready Made structure characterized by functional and dysfunctional logic, incorporating elements of private property converting a public site to facing a self-reflexive process of public-private tension. Оffering furniture known and accessible for mass-use, like cupboards, banal, intimate moments of relation, personal, linking in with the experience of the audience in their everyday environment, mixing high and low, public and private. Fabricating stereotypes, chaotically imitating the principles of the functioning of hierarchies and the arrangements supporting the structuring and the distinctions of everyday life, with an opposite sign. “Challenging the setting and the role of art in consumer society,” shifting cultural values of global media, “a psychological privatization,” ethical privatization, taking the personal relation to the art piece and to the story it tells, as an intimate form of resistance. The “most personal things” follow the flow of narration and its political implications, taking them “out of the closet,” making a public statement about intimate questions, a discussion in confidence. Questions of the participation of the audience, to what extent can it be implicated, “aesthetics is a question of participation,” for instance a projection will start when the visitor opens the door of the closet.

(Dimitrina Sevova)