Wordlessly and passionately about the burning questions
Fredrik Svensk see a successful trinity in the Red Stone
With sommarutställningen Except the words continues the Red Stone its focus on political current affairs, this time with three artists. In Erkan Özgens video Wonderland, we meet 13-year-old Muhammad in the simple home in the boundary \nmellan Turkey and Syria. Excitedly he tells of his experiences of the war and to escape in front of the camera. However, Mohammed does not use the words. But the whole of his body.
the Story which is, to say the least brutal is impossible not to suffer, and here, there is no level where this verklighetseffekt broken. How problematic it may be, has Özgen simply made a work that testifies of something terrible, but at the same time make something beautiful. A way to use contemporary art to show the world something that the world does not see. The price is that this is a work of art by just not only to be art.
Carlos Amorales installation, Life in the Folds ‘ deals with a similar problem. But instead of focusing on the human body’s ability to communicate beyond words, is the processing of a difficult situation on the run this through the creation of an entirely new typography produced in skulpturform. Unlike Muhammad’s ability to just be able to make themselves understood, provided the viewer is here faced with the seemingly incomprehensible abstractions. Characters still have a life and a comprehensible function in an associated animation.
\nI Carla Zaccagninis installation Elements of Beauty: A Tea Set is Never Only a Tea Set is the white walls covered with black ramliknande squares. In the spot in the middle is a book with newspaper articles and statistics about, and images of, the paintings that the suffragettes vandalized in 1913 as a part of their feminist struggle in the united kingdom. This has Zaccagnini made an audio guide with descriptions of the events surrounding the various tables on the basis of archival material from the time.
the Work features not only in the viewer to reflect on a historic fight. By not showing a picture of, for example, Venus with the mirror by Diego Velázquez – one of one of the paintings that were attacked – but rather to portray the event in the audio and in a arkivbaserad book is to respond to a over 100 years old, both konstkritisk and feminist action. This without the to come with moral lectures or espousal enter the event in the history of art by visually exploiting the attractiveness of a political act.
the Title Except the word appeared first as a way to enroll negationens promised land. How much contemporary art is not rooted in reference to it which is not possible to represent with the dominant language regime of the epo? Whether the art had something revolutionary, theological, or existential in sight (1900-century totalitarian representationsregimer was not completely innocent of).
\you day affirmed the denial often around issues of contemporary art eurocentrism and its exterior. Either by focusing on what the dominant image of our historic location excludes and negates. Or by understanding the whole of contemporary art as a normative picture, possible to turn up and down at from the perspective of the not see. At the current berlin biennale turns right now any kind of record in the to max out this rhetoric.
just Think of the title We don’t need another hero, borrowed from the old Tina Turner-dängan, and the related activities which they call the I’m not Who You Think I’m not. I, other words, the appropriation is more classic and the ambition less screwed up, and the works are more literally related to the words and the ability to say something about some of our most burning questions, but that it is neither illustrative trite, or programmatically språkkritiskt. To make it through a \nenkel trinity is both delicate, emotional and thought-provoking.
Röda Sten konsthall, Gothenburg, sweden
19 August
