Rehearsals in Instability curated by Rózsa Farkas presents a group of artworks at Vienna’s Galerie Andreas Huber that display certain disbelief –instead of critique –in the situation outlined by the press release of the “current state of capitalism” and “the rising awareness of the unsustainability in this world”. The show, running September 11 to November 7 as part of the 2015 curated by_Vienna programme, deals with the understanding that although “capitalism as we conventionally know it is shifting”, its “increasing financialisation” of everything will continue: it is a “reproductive social contract”.
The works selected by Farkas take on and absorb the processes and gestures by which capitalism works –to take on possible alternatives, to locate new counter-aesthetics and in one fell swoop to have them saturated, creases stuffed, marketed and re-introduced back into an inescapable mode of value and consumer-ability. As the press release highlights, disbelief and absorbency, as opposed to critique and explanation, perhaps produces something stronger in the current climate (both Art World and socio-economic): a nod, or, at the very least, a desire and concern to ‘move beyond’. How does Art escape?
Charlie Woolley makes two new works, ‘Shelf’ and ‘X’ (4 in a series) which both have shiny strips of aluminium and a sense of reification about their presentation and absorption of stereotypical counter-culture symbols. Emily Jones‘ text lifted from an unknown, un-given context and also, coated in aluminium sits on the wall. Maja Cule, who’s video, ‘Facing the Same Direction‘ (2014) was shown in a solo show at London’s Arcadia Missa, which Farkas runs, is accompanied by a slate plaque on which is etched ‘Do What You Love’ in bubble-writing that’s been filled in. Sidsel Meineche Hansen displays circular and patterned works that call into vision the cyclical production of artwork and its formed subjects. The works of Christopher Kulendran Thomas and Richard Nikl literally hold up the delicacy and instability of dissemination, or how things are constantly newly mediated outwards, traded out, packaged up ‘comfortably’ and as given as “the fabric of our society”, as the press release describes.
What do we believe in? **
Exhibition photos, top right.
The Rehearsals in Instability group exhibition is on at Vienna’s Andreas Huber, running September 11 to November 7, 2015.
Header image: Maja Čule, ‘Facing the Same Direction’ (2014) Install view. Courtesy ANDREAS HUBER.
