November 10, 2015
Contributors: Pio Abad, Peggy Ahwesh, Julieta Aranda, Sarnath Banerjee, CAMP, Moyra Davey, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Rana Hamadeh, Francis Newton Souza, Gabriel Acevedo Velarde, Susanne M. Winterling, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Yin-Ju Chen and James T. Hong, Hu Fang, Hassan Khan, Wietske Maas, Naeem Mohaiemen, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Aaron Schuster, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Charles Stankievech, Jan Verwoert.
Curated by Natasha Ginwala.
Corruption accesses the state body as both a natural and mystical corpus, eventually producing a third phantom body—corrosive and self-extending—emitting from an inside as techniques of social performance, bureaucratic desire, and conversion in the very terms of ethical life. A glistening mirror of false potential in a climate of communal ventriloquism. We are strategically held by this spirit without an image, which thrives in parasitic acts of emergence via disappearance.
Its flesh seizes the veins of the post-revolutionary state, pumping, circulating and blocking in a synchronized manner while unleashing shape-shifting forms as its residue: the “back office” and black market, daytime money laundering and nightly abductions. It is found in the materiality of phone tapping, fake paintings, and defective pixels; dispersed in the creepy smile of a business magnate, snoozing bureaucrats, and the politician’s insincere tongue. This ultimate stench of capital passes from body to body, as though an uncontainable viral flu.
The status of corruption may be said to lie at the division of visible and invisible labor, and at this tipping point it “acts out” and loops back into the body politic as a sentient character. The daily-wage worker and the cognitariat are equally implicated in this realm and made subservient to an uncanny sweep of this veiled hand.
This exhibition has developed through a series of interdisciplinary writing commissions as part of e-flux journal’s SUPERCOMMUNITY issue no. 65 for the 56th Venice Biennale, and ongoing dialogues with artistic practitioners bringing together readings of corruption as a planetary subject—it thereby acts simultaneously as a multidimensional character and as a complex dramaturgical plot. Contributions from Pio Abad, CAMP, Gabriel Acevedo Velarde, and Naeem Mohaiemen minutely expose the state apparatus as a network of covert operations and power relations. Through acts of performativity that are both cyclical and exceptional, works by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Rana Hamadeh, Hassan Khan, and Denise Ferreirada Silva consider questions of duplicity and truth-telling, the production of justice as communal ritual, and active refusals unto the task of representation. A gamut of depraved actions is unleashed in the dark humor and conspiratorial whispers of Sarnath Banerjee, Yin-Ju Chen & James T. Hong, Jan Verwoert, and Aaron Schuster; their scenography takes us from street bribes to FIFA’s crime scandal, through an unexpected brush with the Mafia and into a short animation detailing the history and failures of communism in West Bengal. Official languages of history-telling and their emblematic produce are subverted in favor of residual and annotated taxonomies in the practices of Moyra Davey, Francis Newton Souza, Peggy Ahwesh, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, and Franco “Bifo” Berardi. Meanwhile Julieta Aranda, Susanne M. Winterling, Hu Fang, Wietske Maas, and Charles Stankeivech engage the organic life of corruption through plant species, the interior of bodies and as bodily excess, via the chemical and the alchemical. The SUPERCOMMUNITY contributions are housed in a display architecture designed by Nikolaus Hirsch and Michel Müller.
Corruption may be the still valid universalism in our midst, resonant since antiquity and continuing to find its strength as the invisible institution of neoliberal knowledge society, tasked with the administration of our collective depression. Let us not forget our agency as tricksters in the making-of-a-world. Might it be possible to harvest the productive capacity of corruption’s gestural performance—its speed, expanse, parallel economies, and anti-systemic drive?
The opening night of Corruption: Everybody Knows will include a reading of CAMP’s screenplay Act I, Swearing in Whispers.
Over the course of the following evening, the exhibition will unravel through artist talks and discussions encountering the aesthetics of fraud under martial law in the Philippines with Pio Abad; the navigation of Toxic Sovereigntiesunder extractive settler capitalism in the work of Elizabeth A. Povinelli as a member of the Karrabing Film Collective; the interrelated crossings of organic and artificial figurations of corruption in a new film by Julieta Aranda; cinematic residue, body politics, and ontologies of violence across the experimental film practice of Peggy Ahwesh. Moderated by Natasha Ginwala.
Special thanks to Abhijit Banerjee; Arjun Jassal and Dennis Akham / BlueAnt Digital Intelligence; Art in General; Shumita and Arani Bose Collection, New York; Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris; Members of the Karrabing Film Collective; Valentina Desideri; Murray Guy, New York; Nikolaus Hirsch and Michel Müller; Krisztina Hunya; Pablo de Ocampo; Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez; Grosvenor Gallery, London.
For more information, please contact program [at] e-flux.com.
Reviews
“’Corruption: Everybody Knows …,’ Think Pieces From E-flux”, The New York Times • Holland Cotter
E-flux began in 1998 with an emailed news release for a one-night group show in Chinatown. Since then, it has grown to include a monthly journal and a wide-reaching distribution system for art world information, and it’s become one of the few galleries in the city to present politically minded global fare consistently. Its current show , “Corruption:…
E-flux began in 1998 with an emailed news release for a one-night group show in Chinatown. Since then, it has grown to include a monthly journal and a wide-reaching distribution system for art world information, and it’s become one of the few galleries in the city to present politically minded global fare consistently. Its current show, “Corruption: Everybody Knows …,” will be the last in the organization’s Manhattan space — e-flux is moving to Brooklyn in 2016 — and is very much in its signature think-piece mode.
Organized by Natasha Ginwala, a curator and writer based in Berlin and India, it approaches its theme through gnomic works — each feels like a piece of a larger project — by two dozen artists and a collective. Occasionally, the corruption is in the form of physical decay, depicted or actual: In a 1955 ink drawing by the Indian artist Francis Newton Souza, from his “Gentlemen Series,” a head seems to be disintegrating; in an installation by Charles Stankievech about nuclear waste, cobalt-radiated grapefruit rots away.
Moral corrosion is implied in a piece by Yin-Ju Chen and James T. Hong involving sex toys and live fruit flies. And geopolitics is the defiling agent in satirical cartoons by Sarnath Banerjee and Gabriel Acevedo Velarde; in videos by Hassan Khan (about Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt) and Naeem Mohaiemen (about the 1971 war in Bangladesh); and in audio scripts based on Indian government phone taps by the collective CAMP.
Is there no anti-corruption hope to be had? Franco Berardi, also known as Bifo, finds some in a recent address by Pope Francis. So does Hu Fang in an ensemble of horticultural prints titled “Why We Look at Plants in a Corrupted World.” And there’s sound thinking in essays by several artists — Denise Ferreira da Silva, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Wietske Maas, Aaron Schuster — in a concurrent issue of E-flux Journal. E-flux is talking about reducing its exhibition schedule after its move. I really hope the principals change their minds and keep bringing us artists and ideas we would not otherwise find.
—December 3, 2015
“Corruption: Everybody Knows…”, ArtReview Asia • Ming Lin
ArtReview Asia, vol. 4, no. 2. —April, 2016
ArtReview Asia, vol. 4, no. 2.
—April, 2016