Video in the Round  | A Trilogy of Video Exhibitions  | Bat Yam Museum of Contemporary Art

November 25, 2010 - January 8, 2011

 

Artists Boaz Oppenheim, Itai Eisenstein, Jehoshua (Shuky) Borkovsky, Avner Ben Gal, Arnon Ben David, Ronnie Bass, Dror Daum, Sharif Waked, Pavel Wolberg, Avdey Ter-Oganian, Sharon Yaari, Yitzhak Livneh, Francesco Finizio, Keren Cytter, Zoya Cherkassky, Andrew Kerton, Miki Kratsman, Roee Rosen, Gilad Ratman

Curator Maayan Amir

Opening Thursday, November 25 at 20:00

Conference preceding the opening Sunday, November 21 at 19:00

 

“What is the Political” is a group exhibition in which each participating artist was asked to choose one work of their own and another by a different artist, both of which they see as political. As the exhibition is being constructed, an open conference around the question of the political will take place, with the participation of artists and scholars from different fields. The documentation of this conference will accompany the exhibition, projected on screens along the round wall of the second floor of the museum.

Beyond the desire to delimit and to generate a closed, fixed definition of the political as an abstract idea, or, alternatively, to offer an illustration of the political through images, the exhibition is premised on the question of how the political is perceived by artists. The curatorial process examines the possibilities hidden in the realization of an exhibition that seeks to display a collection of private opinions, to expose affinities and connections between these opinions and members of the community who hold them, and to constitute a platform for the wide variety of ways in which the political can be imagined.  By decentralizing the curatorial act and posing the question to the artists themselves, the exhibition proposes to approach the curatorial process as an open one that enables many voices to be heard.

 

This is a process that generates context without treating it as an absolute value. This kind of curatorial approach is premised on a temporary refusal to give voice to only one ideology. Instead, it is committed to rethinking the curator’s status as a sole auteur. The exhibition seeks to bring together numerous explorations and grapplings, to question the mechanisms of choice and their influence on representation, and to create an event wherein ideas can emerge out of random and ambivalent places.  In its quest for the political, the exhibition does not aim to classify specific art as political, to map the politics of the art field, or to unfold an historical narrative of political images. It is a sincere desire to undermine reductionist schemes, to question the mechanisms of representation themselves, to present a search that does not meld ideas together but leaves them unchained. The assumption on which the exhibition is premised is that the political does not emerge from the artificial fusion of ideas but from the free affinities that are created, in this case, between different artists and works of art.

 

Conference**

Sunday, November 21 at 19:00 (open to the public)

The conference explores how the political is conceived by artists and scholars from different fields and seeks to expose the affinities or collaborations that can exist between the political in art and in intellectual thought. It also asks how artists and scholars can collaborate around shared political issues?

Just like the exhibition, the conference seeks to discuss not only the political but the mechanisms of representation and potential forms of discussion. The conference, which takes the form of a documented round-table discussion, will accompany the exhibition in an unconventional way. The filming will follow the development of the discussion, thus creating a kind of visual round-table discussion that continues to take place throughout the weeks of the exhibition and in which the participants change frequently. Aside from the artists participating in the exhibition, scholars from different fields were also invited to take part in the conference. Several international scholars and professionals will come to Israel especially for this conference: Ingo Niermann, Julia Moritz, Thomas Keenan, and Florian Schneider.

 

Thomas Keenan is a professor of comparative literature and director of the Human Rights Project at Bard College, New York.

Julia Moritz is an art historian, critic, and curator, a graduate of the curatorial program at Goldsmiths College.

Ingo Niermann is a writer and artist. Since 2002 he has edited the book series “Solutions” at Sternberg press.

Florian Schneider is a filmmaker, writer, and curator.

 

The Exhibition Catalogue

The exhibition catalogue presents two essays, each originally published in different forums and proposing a fascinating encounter between art and political philosophy. The first is an essay by art historian Rosalyn Deutsche, which was published under the title “The Art of Not Being Governed So Much,” and the second is the product of a round-table interview with the theoretician of political science, Chantal Mouffe, which was published under the title “Every Form of Art Has a Political Dimension.” (participating in that panel were Rosalyn Deutsche, as well as Thomas Keenan, who will take part in the conference to be held before the opening of this exhibition.) The catalogue also includes in introduction by the curator as well as the artists’ own thoughts on the political.