Unterior Exhibiton Prague
Unterior
Akram Al Halabi, Eva Kadlec, Thomas Kübler, Robert Pawliczek, Janie Poelzl, Susanne Richter, Bartisz Sikorski
curated by
Luisa Kasalicky and Abraham Orden
October 26 – November 7, 2011
GAVU
Academy od Fine Arts in Prague,
U Akademie 4, Prague 7
Unterior
For the Modern, the moral was always to resist tradition. But when tradition is no longer imposed, but only on offer?
Western liberal democracy (WLD) marches toward the status of universal, homgenous state. Traditions, those little nuggets of loval relativity, have stood in the way. HIstorically the solution has been to destroy them; the innovation of late-liberalism has been to realize that in many cases, only going sofar as pacifying a given tradition is not only enough, it is better: not onyl is the societal discomofrt that attend sbearing witness to annihilation releived, but with the tradition still extant, and rendered ubable to pose any resistance, it also becomes potentally useful to the system as a marketable commodity.
The exhibiton Unterior presents a few students from the Abstract Painting class at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna The curatorial duo as well as the Professor assistants of the class Luisa KAslicky and Abraham Orden deal with the didactic approach that to set onself up as a classical modern artist, resisting a traditionthat society has already mastered and rendered passive, is to waste energy in nostalgia, and perhaps to partake of that commodification. In either case it is a forfeit of imagination.
They teach that the where the world’s traditions have been rendered malleable and left, they lie like bits and scraps. These can be gathered into the studio, gathered into the work, repurposed, put to new use, made to function again, but otherwise.
They teach that when an artis takes up a given tradition with respect, with an exe towards how it once “meaned” against WLD before the ideology sapped the meaning out of it, a power can be unlocked that the ideology is not prepared for, a new purchase and resistance: at such meetings of artist and tradition, moments of freedom occur, glimpses of an alternative future.
Akram Al Halabi, Eva Kadlec, Thomas Kübler, Robert Pawliczek, Janine Poelzl, Anne Puhony, Susanne Richter ans Bartosz Sikorski have been mist strongly inspired with the urge to make from the history of art, the traditions therein, a frame in which it is possible for their work to become a new thought.
-Abraham Orden
