14 June–31 July 2013
Sabanci University, Kasa Gallery
Minerva Han Bankalar Caddesi No: 2
Karakoy 34420 Istanbul, Turkey
Hours: 10–17h every day except Sunday
kasagaleri.sabanciuniv.edu
www.museumofcontemporarycuts.org
Jurisdiction Shopping and Decoding the Flow are two solo exhibitions by Paolo Cirio that were made possible by the partnership between Kasa Gallery and the Museum of Contemporary Cuts.
Curatorial team:
Lanfranco Aceti (Senior Curator)
Vince Dziekan (Associate Curator)
Ozden Sahin and Jonathan Munro (Curators)
Paolo Cirio’s Jurisdiction Shopping is an exhibition that focuses on the current schizophrenic post-postmodern relationships between state, corporations and citizens. Cirio’s work democratizes this process of escaping from one’s obligations towards the state by allowing a liberalized and widespread participation in the process of tax evasion—no longer a privilege of the ‘rich few.’
Jurisdiction Shopping offers the viewer the possibility of engaging with a series of artworks that are based on the artist’s experience of attempting to generalize practices of illegality, therefore, presenting the possibility of a world within which exist frameworks for a generalized tax evasion.
This exhibition and its artworks poke fun directly at the failure of the state in recycling itself in a new corporate and economic identity, as well as the failure of the social body to understand that the new corporate mythology and its systems are, in Deleuzian terms, part of the same old apparatus of capture or extortion. Both the state and the social body have been captured and are being squeezed from the corporate global economics that were presented as the saving grace of a concept of society that had been declared dead in the 1980s and that no longer exists.
Decoding The Flow, the new solo exhibition of the Museum of Contemporary Cuts presents a survey of the aesthetic and artistic practice of Paolo Cirio.
Starting from the latest of Cirio’s artworks, Loophole for All, MoCC will present a series of images that will attempt to decode the current financial and social crisis, as well as re-present the larger social issues that have characterized the last part of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century.
Cirio’s artworks have, over the years, received critical acclaim and attention from the press. They have also raised ‘corporate eyebrows’ that have lead to legal actions and controversies.
The Museum of Contemporary Cuts will disseminate every day, for the whole duration of the show, one image of the exhibition Decoding the Flow on its electronic platforms between June 14–July 31, 2013:
museumofcontemporarycuts.org | Facebook | Twitter
Notes on the artist and the artworks
Paolo Cirio is a contemporary artist whose artworks evoke activism for a more equal world. Cirio’s latest artwork, Loophole for All, aims to draw attention towards the relationship between today’s global economy and the alarming amount of tax-dodging activities by international corporations. The focal point of Loophole for All is international companies currently profiting from the legal secrecy provided by the Cayman Islands. Cirio’s activism is directed towards 200,000 companies, which he has identified by hacking into the government servers of the Cayman Islands.
Loophole for All and other artworks of Paolo Cirio indicate a vital relation between activism and art. Other important works of Paolo Cirio include Google will Eat Itself (2005), Amazon Noir (2006) and Face to Facebook (2011), all part of his Hacking Monopolism Trilogy.
In these three artworks, the idea of revelation of the hegemony of online systems and the ‘loophole’ possibility generated as a result of the legal enforceability of such systems provide the viewer with an aesthetic perspective on the current interwoven relationships between art, society, and issues related to political economy.
Cirio’s artist statement underlines that his artworks aspire to educate, inform, investigate, organize and influence contemporary society through the manipulation of media, information and communication.
Artist biography:
Paolo Cirio
Award-winning artist born in 1979, Italy. Paolo Cirio has worked as a media artist in various fields: net art, street art, video art, software art and experimental fiction. He investigates perception and the creation of cultural, political and economic realities manipulated by modes of control over information’s power. His work is built up on the interaction between media and performance.
