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May 7 – June 19, 2010
A Part of No-Part:
Parallelisms Between Then and Now
Curators: Denise Carvalho and Michal Koleček
Jirí Cernický, Tower Block, 2006
Press Release (PDF)
Downloadable image gallery
This exhibition explores totalitarian and post-totalitarian contemporary art from Poland, Czech Republic, Croatia, and New York. The videos and installations are gathered around the idea that history can only be represented through some form of distortion, detour, or absurdity that enables a distancing from the represented reality, so that meaning can be redefined and rearticulated. Jacques Rancière queries: “Are some things unrepresentable?” and responds, “The invention of actions is both a boundary and a passage between two things: the events, at once possible and incredible, which tragedy links; and the recognizable and shareable feelings, volitions and conflicts of will that it offers the spectator.” 1 Political conflict is the tension between a dominant social structure, in which each part has its place, and ‘a part of no-part,’ which stands for a human mass that destabilizes the functional order of things. 2
The predominance of video in the show points to what Polish art critic Marek Wasilewski has noted as Poland’s technological paradox: an increasing predominance of video art, paired with a belated modernity which lacks an adequate consumer market. 3
The political effect of an aesthetic experience is only possible through the disruption between meaning and function, between the thinkable and the feasible. As Jacques Rancière reminds us, the political struggle is not the debate of expressed demands but the struggle for recognition and legitimacy, which can only happen in a space of in-between, a space that acts as the blurring and contesting between the civil society and the public space, creating ‘a part of no part’ that is both temporary and contingent.
Featured Artists:
Hubert Czerepok, Kuba Bakowski, Norman Leto, Józef Robakowski, Milena Dopitová, Jacek Malinowski, Slaven Tolj, Jiří Kovanda, Zdena Kolečková, Jiří Černický, Łukasz Gronowski, Piotr Żyliński, Pavel Mrkus, and Dario Solman
Notes:
1 Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, pp. 109-116. London, GB: Verso, 2009.
2 Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 188.
3 Marek Wasilewski, Sztuka nieobecna [The Absent Art], Poznań 1999, p. 54.
Polish Consultant: Monika Szewczyk, Director of Galeria Arsenał in Bialystok
 
  
This exhibition is made possible thanks to the support from Michal Koleček and Jan Evangelista Purkyne University in Usti nad Labem, Faculty of Art and Design at Jan Evangelista Purkyne University in Usti nad Labem, Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, Monika Szewczyk and Galeria Arsenał, Bialystok, Poland, and Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland, and friends from the Chelsea Art Museum.
Please also visit: www.czechcenter.com
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