Chto Delat: Time Capsule. Artistic Report on Catastrophes and Utopia
Renata Lucas
Peter Bartoš: Situations 1945–2014
November 21, 2014–January 25, 2015
Opening: November 20, 7pm
Secession
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Chto Delat
Time Capsule. Artistic Report on Catastrophes and Utopia
With their exhibition Time Capsule. Artistic Report on Catastrophes and Utopia, the Russian collective Chto Delat responds to the current situation in Russia, the crisis in Ukraine, and the resulting threat of a new Cold War. Together with the graduates of the School of Engaged Art they established in Saint Petersburg in 2013, the collective has created The Excluded. In a Moment of Danger, a four-channel video installation that runs just under an hour in which they reflect on their own sense of exposure and perplexity: “At first glance it could seem like we are trying to use collectivity as a powerful tool in the creation of art. But, unfortunately, this is not the case. We used to think that collectivity is necessary in order to be strong, but now we realize it is necessary simply to maintain one’s sanity.”
The dialectical form that was characteristic of Chto Delat’s earlier films has given way to open narrative structures and the search for a new language adequate to the task of portraying the escalating political situation in Russia. The film is divided into 12 chapters and opens with an attempt to define the performers’ temporal and spatial coordinates. Recent incidents as well as major historic episodes serve as points of reference for a subjective description of the current status quo. Chto Delat also address the role social media play in contemporary society and especially in the development of political actions and protest movements, as well as the question of how young people evolve into political subjects and learn to take responsibility for their lives and society at large. The formal decision to produce a four-channel video installation, a new format for the group, suggests the heterogeneity of voices and serves as a visual equivalent of the general feeling of catastrophes the artists feel reigns today.
Chto Delat (What is to be done?) is a collective that was founded in St. Petersburg in 2003 and counts artists, critics, philosophers, and writers from St. Petersburg and Moscow among its members.
Invited by the board of the Secession
Curator: Bettina Spörr
Renata Lucas
Renata Lucas’s works examine the ways in which the built environment informs social relations and actions. In site-specific interventions, she manipulates architectural structures in order to deconstruct socially defined spaces and their uses and test novel and playful possibilities, sometimes initiating a fresh discussion of ideas of privacy and public sphere, interior and exterior, or history and the present. The measures the artist takes are always based on her personal perspective on the site in question and build on extensive research and often also on complex negotiations. By means of additions, duplications, or superimpositions, she implements subtle alterations that propose an alternative way of perceiving a place.
At the Secession, too, Renata Lucas makes the spatial situation she finds in the downstairs gallery the point of departure for her considerations. The space features limited connections between the interior and exterior, which are accordingly marked as escape routes, and the floor plan appears fragmented, with many nooks and crannies. The artist’s site-specific work includes a handrail that effortlessly blends in with the existing installations and so is only faintly perceptible as an addition; it guides visitors through the rooms to the point where the escape routes cross. In a second project, Lucas draws up an escape plan of her own, for Adolfo Bioy Casares’s story Plan de evasión [A Plan for Escape], first published in 1945. Subdivided by the artist into six chapters, the narrative finds an unexpected way to reach what is, to it, the outside world: its readers—like a parasite of sorts, the text infiltrates other books.
Renata Lucas was born in Ribeirão Preto, Brazil, in 1971 and lives and works in Rio de Janeiro.
Invited by the board of the Secession
Curator: Jeanette Pacher
Peter Bartoš
Situations 1945–2014
Peter Bartoš was an early exponent of conceptual and action art in Slovakia. Coming from an exploration of painting as a process, he realized actions in the late 1960s in which he poured paint on various support media or scattered grids of materials like cinder, dust, chalk powder, or peat over the streets and squares of Bratislava. His primary interest in these projects concerned the physical properties of the materials, the temporary nature of works existing only as processes, and the ways in which materials might be transformed by way of accumulation or dispersal.
Nature is an important source of inspiration for Bartoš. Many of his conceptual works, which often evolve and grow more complex over the course of decades, intertwine questions of ecological planning and the shaping of natural settings with issues of liberty and privacy in connection with (national and political) boundaries. In Situations 1945–2014, an exhibition designed for the Secession, Bartoš presents a first survey of his multifaceted oeuvre in the form of a chronological xerographic catalogue raisonné. In a perspective schooled by anti-art, he regards the photocopy as both a work in itself and a medium that lets him record and distribute his concepts.
Peter Bartoš was born in Prague in 1938 and lives and works in Bratislava.
Invited by the board of the Secession
Curator: Annette Südbeck
Press
Press conference: November 20, 10am
For interview requests and any other questions, please contact katharina.schniebs [at] secession.at
Please find the press releases and images for download here from November 20: www.secession.at/presse
Guided tours: Saturdays and Sundays at 11am and 2pm and by appointment
Permanent presentation: Gustav Klimt Beethoven Frieze
