Kunsthalle Exnergasse

Have the cake and eat it, too

13 Mar - 19 Apr 2008

HAVE THE CAKE AND EAT IT, TOO
Institutional Critique as Instituting Practice

Opening: March 12, 2008, 7pm

Artists: Agentur, Bini Adamczak / Persson Baumgartinger, Zanny Begg / Oliver Ressler, Zanny Begg / Dmitry Vilensky, Chto delat?, Marcelo Expósito / Nuria Vila, Anna Sigmond Gudmundsdottir / Tone Hansen / Marit Paasche, Martin Krenn, Lia / Dan Perjovschi
Designers: Toledo i Dertschei
Curators: Charlotte Martinz-Turek und Luisa Ziaja

Institutions like museum, university or clinic have been analysed and criticized frequently as power-knowledge-complexes because of their disciplining function.
In the meantime, institutional critique itself, for example in the artistic field, became part of that canon, that one it was appealed against in the beginning.
Alongside its canonized history, which is often negotiated by means of spatial metaphors of the stepping out or the bringing into the institution and for this reason again and again imagines a possible outside, it should be asked for mechanisms of the powerful defined determination and its inclusions and exclusions.
How is it possible today, with that knowledge, to articulate protest and critique, to develop forms of structural (new) organization without being taken in by the idea of a dichotomy from inside and outside, by the question of either or?
It attempts to reformulate institutional criticism both as a critical attitude and as an instituting practice.
Therefore, the emphasis is on the options of action proposed by diverse actors in artistic, theoretic and activist fields.

An exhibition-project in the framework of transform.eipcp.net.
This project has been carried out within the framework of transform.eipcp.net and with the support of Culture 2000 program of the European Union.
 

Tags: Zanny Begg, Chto Delat, Marcelo Expósito, Al Hansen, Dan Perjovschi, Oliver Ressler