Everything Under Heaven Is Total Chaos
19 Nov 2010 - 09 Jan 2011
International Festival
EVERYTHING UNDER HEAVEN IS TOTAL CHAOS
19 November, 2010 - 9 January, 2011
Everything Under Heaven Is Total Chaos, the title of International Festival's new exhibition at Göteborg Konsthall, may be read as a negative statement. But is it possible that chaos is also the positive force for transformation - a potential for ideas and thoughts that have not previously been possible? The installation is based on International Festival's theater script Burn Your Boats, which is an abstract story about how humans, in their desire to overthrow the corrupt capitalist system, cause society's downfall. Burn Your Boats offers this destruction as a foundation for a new way of life, because as history has shown us, it is in the aftermath of crisis that emancipation can be achieved and new paradigms formed. The title of the exhibition is a line in the script adapted from the famous quote by Mao Zedong, “everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent”, and it is here - in the ecstasy before the apocalypse - that International Festival have set their scene.
International Festival wishes to create conditions for experiences that we could not previously imagine and asserts that the role of art is to make opportunities for new experiences. Everything Under Heaven Is Total Chaos tells a story that leads the viewer down winding roads pointing towards both the future and the past. The structural model for this installation is the medieval cathedral, which gives architectural volume to the storytelling of the biblical narrative and doubles as the theatre set for liturgical dramas. Similarly, the main exhibition hall narrates the abstract vignettes from Acts I-V in the script Burn Your Boats.
Everything Under Heaven Is Total Chaos is a drama in the form of image, sound, text and objects - a narrative set-design in which the viewer can play the role of the actor. Perhaps we can think of the show as a conspiracy drama, a mystery that weaves a web of associations. The drawings on the wall, might indicate that Freud's house in London, a symbol of psychoanalysis, is connected to the worship of technological development represented by the so-called "Cargo cults”. The image of the Greek god, whose business is to undermine and corrupt, intersects with Brian De Palma's 80's classic film Body Double, in which the quest for identity clashes with dreams and desires. In Everything In Heaven Is Total Chaos, mysterious combinations of mythical symbols collide with everyday objects - guitars and Chinese vases, bubblegums and megaphones - all various forms of authenticity and distortion, consumerism and conspiracy theories. In the middle of the floor, a number of tattoo machines promise inscriptions that soften but never disappear. A handful of wedding dresses manifest our need for ritual, but also symbolize the consumption of identities. On the wall, a woman with a torch is coming towards us, right before the movie starts and everything is perfect. Beside her is a picture of Michael Rifkin on the set of the classic "The Exorcist", where people’s bodies have become landlords for the incomprehensible. A balcony, in search of its own existence, rebels against its role as ornament. Beach balls and oil fields side by side, cowhide rugs and bamboo poles are next to the fox that seems to survive it all.
The drama does not stop, there is no happy ending. In the fifth act, the gods come down—deus ex machina—and the unknown takes over and the story continues. It is an irritation on the body, something that itches, but not because of something that is there, but because of something only imagined. Everything under heaven is total chaos ... The situation is excellent. Let the game begin.
International Festival was founded in 2004 by architect Tor Lindstrand and choreographer Mårten Spångberg. The duo describes the International Festival as an open production platform with the intention to work in the tension between the founders' two forms of expression, in particular, to create knowledge by questioning the social and artistic conventions. International Festival has largely operated outside of Sweden and has worked all over Europe and in China and the United States. The group site-specific works have been activated at Tate Liverpool, Van Abbe Museum, Le Magazine (Grenoble), European Kunsthalle (Cologne), Performa (New York), Tanz im August (Berlin), Kaai Theater, ImPulsTanz and architecture biennials in Venice and Szenshen (China).
International Festival – Everything Under Heaven is Total Chaos includes Krõõt Juurak and Jessyka Watson-Galbraight with assistance from Christian Töpfner, Marcus Doverud, Alissa Shnaider, Maren Grimm.
The installation is a collaborative effort executed with the assistance of Gunnhild Bjørshol, Dragana Lukic, and Neda Zarfsaz, students in the C:Art Master's Program at The Valand School of Fine Arts, Gothenburg University
EVERYTHING UNDER HEAVEN IS TOTAL CHAOS
19 November, 2010 - 9 January, 2011
Everything Under Heaven Is Total Chaos, the title of International Festival's new exhibition at Göteborg Konsthall, may be read as a negative statement. But is it possible that chaos is also the positive force for transformation - a potential for ideas and thoughts that have not previously been possible? The installation is based on International Festival's theater script Burn Your Boats, which is an abstract story about how humans, in their desire to overthrow the corrupt capitalist system, cause society's downfall. Burn Your Boats offers this destruction as a foundation for a new way of life, because as history has shown us, it is in the aftermath of crisis that emancipation can be achieved and new paradigms formed. The title of the exhibition is a line in the script adapted from the famous quote by Mao Zedong, “everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent”, and it is here - in the ecstasy before the apocalypse - that International Festival have set their scene.
International Festival wishes to create conditions for experiences that we could not previously imagine and asserts that the role of art is to make opportunities for new experiences. Everything Under Heaven Is Total Chaos tells a story that leads the viewer down winding roads pointing towards both the future and the past. The structural model for this installation is the medieval cathedral, which gives architectural volume to the storytelling of the biblical narrative and doubles as the theatre set for liturgical dramas. Similarly, the main exhibition hall narrates the abstract vignettes from Acts I-V in the script Burn Your Boats.
Everything Under Heaven Is Total Chaos is a drama in the form of image, sound, text and objects - a narrative set-design in which the viewer can play the role of the actor. Perhaps we can think of the show as a conspiracy drama, a mystery that weaves a web of associations. The drawings on the wall, might indicate that Freud's house in London, a symbol of psychoanalysis, is connected to the worship of technological development represented by the so-called "Cargo cults”. The image of the Greek god, whose business is to undermine and corrupt, intersects with Brian De Palma's 80's classic film Body Double, in which the quest for identity clashes with dreams and desires. In Everything In Heaven Is Total Chaos, mysterious combinations of mythical symbols collide with everyday objects - guitars and Chinese vases, bubblegums and megaphones - all various forms of authenticity and distortion, consumerism and conspiracy theories. In the middle of the floor, a number of tattoo machines promise inscriptions that soften but never disappear. A handful of wedding dresses manifest our need for ritual, but also symbolize the consumption of identities. On the wall, a woman with a torch is coming towards us, right before the movie starts and everything is perfect. Beside her is a picture of Michael Rifkin on the set of the classic "The Exorcist", where people’s bodies have become landlords for the incomprehensible. A balcony, in search of its own existence, rebels against its role as ornament. Beach balls and oil fields side by side, cowhide rugs and bamboo poles are next to the fox that seems to survive it all.
The drama does not stop, there is no happy ending. In the fifth act, the gods come down—deus ex machina—and the unknown takes over and the story continues. It is an irritation on the body, something that itches, but not because of something that is there, but because of something only imagined. Everything under heaven is total chaos ... The situation is excellent. Let the game begin.
International Festival was founded in 2004 by architect Tor Lindstrand and choreographer Mårten Spångberg. The duo describes the International Festival as an open production platform with the intention to work in the tension between the founders' two forms of expression, in particular, to create knowledge by questioning the social and artistic conventions. International Festival has largely operated outside of Sweden and has worked all over Europe and in China and the United States. The group site-specific works have been activated at Tate Liverpool, Van Abbe Museum, Le Magazine (Grenoble), European Kunsthalle (Cologne), Performa (New York), Tanz im August (Berlin), Kaai Theater, ImPulsTanz and architecture biennials in Venice and Szenshen (China).
International Festival – Everything Under Heaven is Total Chaos includes Krõõt Juurak and Jessyka Watson-Galbraight with assistance from Christian Töpfner, Marcus Doverud, Alissa Shnaider, Maren Grimm.
The installation is a collaborative effort executed with the assistance of Gunnhild Bjørshol, Dragana Lukic, and Neda Zarfsaz, students in the C:Art Master's Program at The Valand School of Fine Arts, Gothenburg University