fluc

wanne

IN DER KUBATUR DES KABINETTS - der kunstsalon im Fluc zeigt:

Wednesday, 14. September

AGOGO

Kuratiert von Victoria Dejaco und Kinga Ignasiak.

mit
C-Black
Frankie Dark-O
Hottensiah
Johnny Draztic
Risasi

DJ Bob
DJ 3gga

FB-EVENT:

My Go at Art Activism
Having a go at something means to try something. A go. Incidentally, the evening has been named - not by me - Agogo. Agogo is an instrument used in the traditional Yoruba music of West Africa. I liked that coincidental pun.

“Current discussions about art are very much centered on the question of art activism—that is, on the ability of art to function as an arena and medium for political protest and social activism. The phenomenon of art activism is central to our time because it is a new phenomenon—quite different from the phenomenon of critical art that became familiar to us during recent decades. Art activists do not want to merely criticize the art system or the general political and social conditions under which this system functions. Rather, they want to change these conditions by means of art—not so much inside the art system but outside it, in reality itself. Art activists try to change living conditions in economically underdeveloped areas, raise ecological concerns, offer access to culture and education for the populations of poor countries and regions, attract attention to the plight of illegal immigrants, improve the conditions of people working in art institutions, and so forth. In other words, art activists react to the increasing collapse of the modern social state.”
My first show at Fluc in 2014, thematized the awkwardness of art in a location of night entertainment and our own awkwardness facing social situations. The second show in 2015 eliminated the art object as a visual thing altogether and had artists create cocktails, smells, sounds and sensations. Both those evenings some observations inspired this follow-up invitation to Kubatur des Kabinetts. For this third evening I radically eliminated my own foundations, my comfort zone and the usual suspects of people in my network. The friend of a friend of a friend got me in touch with Kinga Ignasiak of Caring Hands who is very much connected with the African community in Vienna and set up this whole African evening in constant communication with me.

My aim was to create a space for a different kind of interaction and a different kind of cultural experience for the art public who is familiar with the program of Kubatur des Kabinetts. A certain intellectual tradition rooted in the writings of Walter Benjamin and Guy Debord states that the aestheticization and spectacularization of politics, including political protest, are bad things because they divert attention away from the practical goals of political protest and towards its aesthetic form. But and aestheticization of a cause does not counteract it, but it is complementary and amplifying. Culture needs to be more political than ever. And what these times need is reaching out to strangers, trusting in the unfamiliar, seeing the person and the potential in the unknown. This here is what we need right now, more than paint and plastic, although that is important too.

In the end, what I am looking for, as a person, but also as a curator is human connection in my exhibition making, in the experience I want the public to have with the works I show, in the artists I bring together. In a world that lets more wrong happen everyday, gestures and efforts to make something right, become more and more important.
Humanity needs to find common ground and unite. Culture is a reflection of the homo sapiens. Art as our culture should reflect the human race as a whole.There is no need to call it activism just because it is political. Every human with a thoughtful mind and the heart in the right place is in some way a political activist.
(Text: Victoria Dejaco)

1 Boris Groys, e-flux 2014

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