Group exhibition:
ID: E14.2
Title:
The Right to be Forgotten
Date:
December 3 — 5, 2014
Place:
C-ROOM, Stockholm University’s Frescati Campus, Stockholm, Sweden
Curator:
Maria Kotlyachkova
Artists:
Ulyana Bychenkova, Dobrinya Ivanov, Nikita Kadan, Alies’ Kudraschou, Taus Makhacheva, Anastasiya Ryabova, Olga Sosnovskaya, Sergey Shabohin, Alesia Zhitkevich, Anna Zvyagintseva
Work:
Site-specific installation ST()RE #5: Hadron Collider
Sergey Shabohin:
fragment of installation
ST()RE #5: Hadron Collider,
2014
fragment of installation
ST()RE #5: Hadron Collider,
2014
Explication:
Having Nietsche‘s concept of active forgetting within the context of a contemporary art museum as a starting concept for the production, participating artists worked on the idea of a burial that could take place within their own practice. The project presents a certain cut of art history featuring artists from Eastern-Europe who grew up in the times of the fall of the Berlin wall and who share the interest in relation to their common heritage.
The exhibition comprises commissioned works that will be included into a site-specific publication released by Kalmar Konstmuseum the following year.
The work of artists was supported by a non-monetary fee in form of artist books kindly provided by the following artists collectives, publishing houses and organizations: Andperseand Publishing, Centre of Nowhere, Breadfield, Konst-ig, LabyrintPress, Libraryman, Moonspacebooks, Nilleditions, Pionier Press, Raketa.
The exhibition comprises commissioned works that will be included into a site-specific publication released by Kalmar Konstmuseum the following year.
The work of artists was supported by a non-monetary fee in form of artist books kindly provided by the following artists collectives, publishing houses and organizations: Andperseand Publishing, Centre of Nowhere, Breadfield, Konst-ig, LabyrintPress, Libraryman, Moonspacebooks, Nilleditions, Pionier Press, Raketa.
Context:
Kalmar Konstmuseum is situated on a territory that used to have an old church and its graveyard which were abandoned at the beginning of seventeenth century when the city was moved further away from the coast in order to secure it from foreign invasion. Nowadays there is another graveyard nearby. The museum is situated on modern pillars that protect the remains thus continuing a pattern of a museum as a place for preservation and remembrance. Immense windows facing the East provided Kalmar Konstmusem with a conceptual frame of a museum as a gesamtkunstwerk: the museum — being situated on the most Eastern part of the West — was built with an intention of strengthening cultural relations with Eastern Europe.
Notions of cultural and social burden as a result of accelerated production of history are in tight connection with the museumification that was studied by German philosopher Hermann Lübbe: «…as in a museum, something similar is happening at our graveyards: limited territorial capacities force us to cut the time of graves’ preservation, thus shortening the time of active memory dedicated to the departed and – increases the number of tombs, which are taken under control by memorial safeguard services due to the presumable immortality of the dead». Such archives and collections, especially in case of a contemporary art museum as a stage for the flow of art events, demand growing aftercare that leaves less capacities to work with art that is actually contemporary.
Nietzsche’s concept of active forgetting as a divine gift that provides us with strength to move forward gains more meaning in our times of google policy and of contemporary art museums’ obsession in preserving everything that is touched by the hand of an Artist. The documentation of an artwork becomes an artwork in its own right, as an alternative to an obsolete heaviness of museumification.
In a number of German undertakings one can ask for leaving the information on his burial spot unknown to the relatives, thus taking away the burden of aftercare. This leaves us with the question — whose right is stronger: the right for mourning or the right to be forgotten?
Notions of cultural and social burden as a result of accelerated production of history are in tight connection with the museumification that was studied by German philosopher Hermann Lübbe: «…as in a museum, something similar is happening at our graveyards: limited territorial capacities force us to cut the time of graves’ preservation, thus shortening the time of active memory dedicated to the departed and – increases the number of tombs, which are taken under control by memorial safeguard services due to the presumable immortality of the dead». Such archives and collections, especially in case of a contemporary art museum as a stage for the flow of art events, demand growing aftercare that leaves less capacities to work with art that is actually contemporary.
Nietzsche’s concept of active forgetting as a divine gift that provides us with strength to move forward gains more meaning in our times of google policy and of contemporary art museums’ obsession in preserving everything that is touched by the hand of an Artist. The documentation of an artwork becomes an artwork in its own right, as an alternative to an obsolete heaviness of museumification.
In a number of German undertakings one can ask for leaving the information on his burial spot unknown to the relatives, thus taking away the burden of aftercare. This leaves us with the question — whose right is stronger: the right for mourning or the right to be forgotten?