06.
   
   
                                                   
 
 

Apexart, New York

Unrest, 2012
 

Unrest: Revolt Against Reason

Apexart, New York

September 12 - October 27, 2012

Curator: Natalie Musteata

 

Featuring work by: mounir fatmi, Claire Fontaine, Shilpa Gupta, Iman Issa, Tala Madani, Ahmet Ögüt, Tomáš Rafa, and Alexandre Singh

 

“Revolt against Reason!” stated Herbert Marcuse in his 1972 book Counter-Revolution and Revolt. Writing against the backdrop of the escalating Vietnam War, Marcuse judged that the conditions of twentieth century capitalism have so greatly changed from those of the previous century that a future revolution would require an expanded base, strategy, and direction. Such revolution would necessitate the rejection of “Reason.” Not just of the establishment, capitalism, and bourgeois society, but of Reason itself (in the Kantian sense)—and art, a sphere defined by its resistance to reality, he asserted, would be uniquely positioned to provoke the radical transformation of political thought and action. 

At the onset of the twenty-first century, the complex relationship between creative practice and political activism has gained new critical relevance. The wave of Arab Spring revolutions and the growth of the global Occupy movements have ignited a reassessment of the intersection between art and politics—as evidenced by recent exhibitions including the 7th Berlin Biennale and dOCUMENTA (13). UNREST seeks a focused perspective; it reflects on the idea of experiential revolt within artistic practices that have emerged in the last decade. The exhibition presents eight contemporary artists who respond to recent historical changes by engaging with issues of resistance against conformist reason. At times this manifests itself as an instigative action, other times as a responsive gesture, and occasionally as an urgent awareness-raising exercise.

The Mumbai-based artist Shilpa Gupta, for instance, probes deep-seated issues of national identity and power politics in her new media work. Consider her sculptural sound piece, Tryst with Destiny (2007-08), a solitary microphone that broadcasts Gupta singing the historic speech delivered by Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, at the stroke of midnight on August 14, 1947, to celebrate the country’s independence from Britain. A printed version of the speech, reduced in font size to the point of illegibility, hangs next to it on the wall. Gupta’s deft oration touches on equality, prosperity, democracy, and freedom. Yet, her tone, wavering with each line, renders visible the distinctions between past promise and unresolved conflict, specifically as it relates to cultural divisions and the clashing of borders between India and Pakistan, issues that are still critical today.

Unfolding, in Marcusian terms, “an intelligence of opposition,” Moroccan artist mounir fatmi makes use of national emblems to subversive ends. His installation, G8-The Brooms (Contamination) (2008), is composed of twelve flags: the recognizable eight denote the countries that make up the G8 (a forum established in 1975 for the governments of the world’s largest economies), whereas the other four (all monochrome black) stand for anarchy. Propped up in a cluster against the wall, each flag—a sacred totem of authority—is buttressed by a push broom—a profane utensil of the working class. The flag/broom combination is a leitmotif in fatmi’s work, and sometimes implies a symbolic “cleaning up.” Here it acts as a poignant metaphor for the relationship between the 1 and 99%, as well as the forced semblance of its equilibrium.

How can a minority fight injustice? The Occupy movement, according to American philosopher Noam Chomsky, “is the first major public response to thirty years of class war.” It is a movement based on moral solidarity rather than political and economic rationality. Oscar William Sam (2012), a four-minute video by Kurdish/Turkish artist Ahmet Ögüt, consists of a compilation of shots of the Occupy Wall Street camp in Zucotti Park (days before it was evicted by the NYPD Counterterrorism unit at 2 a.m. on November 15, 2011). In it, an anonymous finger points out individuals in the camp, calling them by the most popular first names in the United States. Throughout the video, both the identity and position of the protagonist remain unclear: is he an informant or a fellow occupier? The title, which refers to the supposed names of the squatters (all names are fictitious), also functions as an acronym for the Occupy Wall Street movement, and as abbreviations often deployed by law enforcement officials to single out individuals. Using the repetition of minimal actions—in this case, naming—Ö?üt identifies the movement’s power, i.e., its solidarity, its sense of belonging, and its espousal of being-together beyond a politics of identity.

Set against the background of political unrest, demonstrations, blockades, and scenes of everyday life, Slovakian artist Tomáš Rafa’s ongoing video project, New Nationalism in the Heart of Europe (2009-12), documents the fine line between patriotism and exalted nationalism, as well as the aggression instigated by racist actions and xenophobia. Besides recording anti-Fascist protests in the Czech Republic, and the Occupy movement in New York, Rafa has focused on pro-life rallies in Switzerland, LGBT marches in Poland, and displays of extremism elsewhere. How could protest movements and practices grounded in aesthetic experiments act as oppositional cultural forms and reshape social reality? Rafa suggests that the first steps would precisely entail the reversal of conformity, passivity, and acceptance of the established order (i.e., an order manifested in the one-dimensional language of the media and politicians).

The transformative tactics of “striking” are salient to the practice of Paris-based collective Claire Fontaine. Founded in 2004, Claire Fontaine, whose name is derived from a brand of French notebooks, describes herself as a “ready-made artist”—the equivalent of a urinal or Brillo box. Her neo-conceptual pieces provoke an ongoing interrogation of the political “impotence” of contemporary art. Claire Fontaine explores to what extent forms of cultural and social rebellion develop oppositional modes of acting that could subvert the one-dimensional society. In Fight Fire with Fire (2006), a sign made of cardboard and smoke, she implements the language, aesthetic, and “poor art” materials of protest. The text itself is lifted from placards carried by French youths of African and Maghrebian descent during the series of riots that took place in October and November of 2005 in Clichy-sous-Bois, a suburb of Paris. In the text, Human Strike Has Already Begun (2005), Claire Fontaine suggests that to break with the status quo one must engage in “human strike”—a revolt inspired by Italian feminist groups of the 1970s to counteract constricting social relations (i.e., housework, obligatory sex) endorsed by the dominant order.

The British artist Alexandre Singh approaches politics in a less overt, but equally effective manner. A Wikipediast philosopher, he is an inventor of new linkages, an author of a language of defiance. Weaving facts with fiction, as well as history with current events, he often makes use of word plays and non-linear, associative thinking. In one of his earliest works, The Economist (2006), Singh takes a political idea and transforms it into an intertextual hyperlink. He begins with the cover of an edition of The Economist—a publication that Singh remembers lying around his childhood home—to which he applies the anagram logic of the Kabbala to reveal the publication’s hidden messages. Singh is precisely the kind of artist that Marcuse envisaged when he said that art must discover “hidden and repressed truths,” in order to shape social reality, and produce “society [itself] as a work of art.”

In her work, Iranian-born Tala Madani explores the subversive, politically-inflected quality of satire. Humor is one of the most powerful forms of protest: it disrupts and reshapes the world as we know it. Appropriating the art of the trickster, Madani offers resistance to dominant ideologies. Her darkly playful scenarios feature Middle Eastern men playing out fictive and deviant rituals, which satirize the religious fundamentalism and sexism—especially machismo—still pervasive in contemporary society. For UNREST, Madani presents two works: Spiral Suicide (2012), a large diptych painting in which a generic man is caught in a vortex, spiraling to his self-inflicted death; and Music Man (2009), an accompanying animation in which a burly man tortures his captive by having him vomit repeatedly on a musical staff, an exercise that results in a silent score for the senseless brutality. Both pieces are pervaded by a sense of futility, made explicit through the circuitous iteration of graphic violence. Madani’s use of humor acts as a strategy of rupture that simultaneously liberates, questions, and reveals.

The revolutionary transformation of our increasingly stifled society and culture requires a nonconformist language. Egyptian artist Iman Issa’s work is grounded in the seditious use of traditional materials. In Colors, Lines, Numbers, Symbols, Shapes, and Images (2010), a set of four minimal posters conceived prior to Egypt’s uprising against long-standing autocrat Hosni Mubarak, Issa mines national symbols to probe their formal and conceptual codes. Based on the “political/election poster,” the series was designed at a moment when propagandistic symbols had been emptied of meanings, and revolutionary actions seemed unattainable. Stimulated by Issa’s memories of specific historical moments, events, places, and characters, each unique poster mediates the visual and written language of political iconography with the potential of emancipatory thought—the “what is” and “what could be.”

UNREST opens on the daybreak of the 11th anniversary of September 11th, and the one-year anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movements. The motivation for this exhibition resides in the idea that art can produce revolutionary consciousness. Art best serves praxis in its own dimension, i.e., not by being a mere instrument of propaganda, but by critically engaging, subverting, opposing, and resisting the political establishment. When expressing a new language, art becomes a material source in social reconstruction. In other words, art has the agency to react to the deep crisis of democracy and transform the world. The artists in UNREST play an indispensable role in this context: by engaging with the Arab Spring revolutions, the Occupy movements, “human striking,” and other forms of protest as forms of “social sculpture,” they provide a new language of expression for the transformation of society itself. They thus engender a re-thinking of culture, a reawakening of engaged political thought, and a renewed state of UNREST.

 

Natalie Musteata, September 2012

 
Solo shows (selection)
 
2023
L'appartement 22 2023Piero Atchugarry Gallery 2023
Baró Galeria 2023
2022
Wilde Gallery 2022Ceysson & Bénétière 2022
Musée La Kasbah 2022Es Baluard Museu 2022
2021
Conrads Gallery 2021Officine dell'Immagine 2021
ADN 2021
2019
Skanstull Metro Station 2019Analix Forever 2019
Ceysson & Bénétière 2019Wilde Gallery 2019
2018
CDAN 2018Göteborgs Konsthall 2018
2017
Art Front Gallery 2017Officine dell'Immagine 2017
Galerie De Multiples 2017Analix Forever Gallery 2017
Jane Lombard Gallery 2017Galerie Delacroix 2017
Goodman Gallery 2017Lawrie Shabibi 2017
Analix Forever Gallery 2017Maisons des Arts du Grütli 2017
2016
ADN Platform 2016Keitelman Gallery 2016
Labanque 2016MMP+ 2016
2015
MAMCO 2015MIAMIBUS 2015
Analix Forever 2015
2014
CCC Tours 2014ADN Galeria 2014
ADN Platform 2014Analix Forever 2014
Yvon Lambert 2014
2013
Museum Kunst Palast 2013Keitelman Gallery 2013
Paradise Row 2013Institut Français de Casablanca 2013
Galerie Fatma Jellal 2013Analix Forever 2013
2012
Goodman Gallery 2012Shoshana Wayne Gallery 2012
Lombard-Fried Projects 2012
2011
Galerie Conrads 2011Fondazione Collegio San Carlo 2011
Galerie Hussenot 2011AKBank Sanat 2011
2010
Galerie Hussenot 2010
2009
Galerie Conrads 2009FRAC Alsace 2009
2008
Galerie Delacroix IFM 2008Creux de l'enfer 2008
2007
Galerie Ferdinand van Dieten 2007Musée national Pablo Picasso 2007
Shoshana Wayne Gallery 2007La maison rouge 2007
Lombard Freid projects 2007
2006
Bank galerie 2006
2005
CAC d'Istres 2005
2004
Espace des arts Colomiers 2004 CAC Le Parvis 2004
2003
Migros museum 2003
 
Biennials, Triennials (selection)
 
2022
Setouchi Triennale 2022
2020
Altai Biennale 2020
2019
Setouchi Triennale 2019SCREEN IT - Stadstriennale Hasselt Genk 5 2019
2018
13eme Biennale de Dakar 20187th Echigo Tsumari Art Triennale 2018
1er Biennale de Rabat 2018
2017
57th Venice Biennale 20177eme Biennale Architecture, Shenzhen 2017
11eme Biennale de Bamako 201715eme Biennale d'art contemporain Alios! 2017
2016
Biennale Poznan 2016Setouchi Triennale 2016
2015
10èmes Rencontres de Bamako 20155th Thessaloniki Biennale 2015
16th Media art Biennale Wro 20151st Trio Biennale, Rio de Janeiro 2015
2nd Bodrum Biennial 2015
2014
Fotofest Biennial 2014
2013
5th Auckland Triennial 2013White House Biennial 2013
2012
10th Dakar Biennial 2012Manif d'Art 6 2012
2011
3rd Thessaloniki Biennial 201111th Lyon Biennial 2011
54th Venice Biennial 2011
2010
XIIth Cairo Biennial 20101st Mediterranean Biennial of Haifa 2010
Port Izmir 2, international triennial of contemporary art 20109th Dakar Biennial 2010
Biennale Cuvée 2010
2009
Xth Lyon Biennial 2009Art Tel Aviv 2009
9èmes Rencontres de Bamako 2009
2008
1st Brussels Biennial 2008Pontevedra Biennial 2008
2007
24th Biennial Memorial of Nadezda Petrovic 20071st Luanda Triennial 2007
52th Venice Biennial 20078th Sharjah Biennial 2007
2004
Gwangju biennial 2004
2006
2nd Seville Biennial 20067th Dakar Biennial 2006
2000
4th Dakar Biennial 2000
1999
7th Biennal Art Media 1999
 
Group shows (selection)
 
2023
Pola Museum 2023museum in progress 2023
2022
UB Art Galleries 2022Fondation Boghossian 2022
Cobra Museum 2022
2021
Brooklyn Museum 2021Fondation Boghossian 2021
Museo Reina Sofía 2021Iselp 2021
Es Baluard 2021
2020
Fondation Boghossian 2020La Galerie 38 2020
Sala de la Provincia de la Diputacion 2020MOCAK 2020
Ceysson & Bénétière 2020Goodman Gallery 2020
Palais de Tokyo 2020American University in Cairo 2020
Musée des Confluences 2020
2019
Fondation Boghossian 2019MAMA 2019
Ceysson & Bénétière 2019Maison Populaire 2019
Bedford Gallery 2019 Evliyagil Museum 2019
Jane Lombard 2019James Cohan 2019
2018
Mathaf 2018MACAAL 2018
Fondation Boghossian 2018Sammlung Philara 2018
Nasher Museum of Art 2018Ellen Noël Art Museum 2018
Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea 2018MOCAK 2018
Bozar Center for fine arts 2018Philharmonie de Paris 2018
The Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery 2018Goodman Gallery 2018
Institut Français de Saint Louis 2018Pensacola Museum of Art 2018
Von der Heydt-Kunsthalle 2018
2017
Gifu Museum 2017Huntsville Museum of Art 2017
Bandjoun Station 2017Institut des Cultures d’Islam 2017
Bellevue Arts Museum 2017Mudac 2017
Primo Marella Gallery 2017Goodman Gallery 2017
MACAAL 2017Museum De Wieger 2017
Conrads Gallery 2017Galerie Ceysson & Bénétière 2017
Keitelman Gallery 2017Musée du Pays de Hanau 2017
Château de Servières 2017CEAA 2017
Fondazione Fotografia Modena 2017H&R Block Artspace 2017
2016
Bedford Gallery 2016Beijing Today Art Museum 2016
Hôtel des Arts 2016Museum of Old and New Art 2016
Labanque 2016Les Photaumnales 2016
Al Maaden 2016Kunsthalle Faust 2016
Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg 2016Archives Nationales 2016
Bardo National Museum 2016Arles 2016
Musée d'Art Moderne de Troyes 2016Rotor 2016
Goodman Gallery 2016Musée Bartholdi 2016
Institut d’Art Contemporain 2016Santander Art Gallery 2016
Brandts & Viborg Kunsthal 2016
2015
Fondazione VIDEOINSIGHT 2015A Tale of a Tub 2015
Contemporary Istanbul 2015ADMAF 2015
Goodman Gallery 2015Keitelman Gallery 2015
Galeria Municipal do Porto 2015Fabra i Coats 2015
AMOCA 2015Monastère Royal de Brou 2015
CAC La Traverse 2015FRAC Franche-Comté 2015
ZKM 2015The National Library 2015
Station 2015La FabriC - Fondation Salomon 2015
Van Abbemuseum 2015The Brooklyn Museum 2015
MMP+ 2015Sharjah Museum 2015
Kamel Lazaar Foundation 2015Sextant & + 2015
2014
Gwangju Museum of Art 2014QAGOMA 2014
N.B.K. 2014CAyT Centro de Arte y Technologia 2014
Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery 2014Station 2014
Institut du Monde Arabe 2014Art Gallery of Western Australia 2014
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art 2014Palais de Tokyo 2014
2013
L'art dans les chapelles 2013MAD Museum 2013
Marseille - Provence 2013V&A Museum 2013
30 ans des FRAC 2013MAC Marseille 2013
MAXXI 2013
2012
Museu de Arte Moderna de Salvador de Bahia 2012Institut du Monde Arabe 2012
Edge of Arabia 2012Apexart 2012
B.P.S. 22 2012Dorsky Gallery 2012
International Center of Graphic Arts 2012
2011
Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art 2011Fondation Blachère 2011
Brooklyn Museum 2011Dublin Contemporary 2011
Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts 2011Museum on the Seam 2011
Tri Postal Lille 2011Meeting Point 6 2011
2010
The New School 2010Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil 2010
Fondazione Fotografia Modena 2010Aargauer Kunsthaus 2010
KAdE 2010Kunst Museum Bochum 2010
Moscow museum of modern art 2010Art Gallery of Ontario 2010
2009
Fondation Gulbenkian 2009Centro de Arte de Santa Monica 2009
Beirut Art Center 2009Salina Art Center 2009
2008
Kunstverein Medienturm Ilz 2008Te Papa museum 2008
Studio Museum Harlem 2008Haus der Kunst 2008
Centre Pompidou 2008CAAM 2008
Centro de Arte de Santa Monica 2008
2007
Johannesburg Art Gallery 2007
2006
CAC Le Parvis 2006CAPC musée d'art contemporain 2006
Bank Galerie 2006Les Abattoirs 2006
Moderna museet 2006Mori art museum 2006
2005
Wereldmuseum 2005Centre Pompidou 2005
The Stenersen Museum 2005Saw gallery 2005
Konstmuseum 2005Hayward Gallery 2005
2004
Museum Kunst Palast 2004Tri Postal Lille 2004
2003
2nd international contemporary art meeting 2003
2002
Espacio C 2002
1999
O.N.A. Foundation 1999CAC Castres 1999
Musée des beaux-arts de Dôle 1999Musée des arts décoratifs 1999
 
 
Public Space Projects (selection)
 
2015
Metavilla Collateral Project to the 12th Havana Biennial
Prison Qara Meknès Art Paris
2014
Analix Forever
2013
Sculpture Beach Art Dubai
2012
Le Printemps de Septembre Narracje 4
2010
Ivry FIAC Tuileries
2004
Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt