Dénes Farkas
Evident in Advance
June 1–November 24, 2013
Palazzo Malipiero
San Samuele Square, S. Marco 3199
Center for Contemporary Arts, Estonia is proud to announce that artist Dénes Farkas will represent Estonia at the 55th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia with his project Evident in Advance, curated by Adam Budak.
Farkas’s post-conceptual photo-based practice engineers the substructures of society at the moment it renews and remakes its identity. Using minimal means, the artist constructs cinematic spaces of contemplation, where the plot awaits its author and the characters are absent. Silent déjâ vu interiors with no apparent spatial hierarchy become the potential crime scenes of a representation in yet another crisis and decline. Farkas’s social geometry is a cartography of failure and dysfunction. His visually reduced, rebellious spectacle of language announces a new melancholy in a world in doubt.
Conceived for the Estonian Pavilion, Dénes Farkas’s Evident in Advance develops a vast diapason of issues, grouped around the elusiveness of language, the (im)possibilities of translation and the logic of infinite re-translations. Inspired by the adventurous storyline of American writer, Bruce Duffy’s ground-breaking novel, The World As I Found It (1987), a mélange of fiction and reality, truth and fakery, where history, biography and philosophy are intertwined in a witty narrative of the lives of three philosophers, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, and G. E. Moore, the exhibition is orchestrated as a composition based on slightly varying sets of a score: the articulations of the same story created from the carefully deconstructed novel and other related sources (the texts of the above-mentioned philosophers, texts of the authors and co-authors of the project) are spatialized within a given physical space and the mental space of the viewer’s perceptive field. Here, we are at the threshold of the construction of a meaning as an ongoing study of repetition and silence. Playing with the fragments and resetting the acknowledged codes of a game, but also desperately trying to decipher the borders—the end and the beginning—and, last but not least, the center—a guarantee of the meaning of the story—a story which might not be constructible, or one which does not exist at all—a phantasmagoria of sorts (but evident in advance…).
Dénes Farkas was born in 1974 in Budapest, and lives and works in Tallinn, Estonia. He graduated from the Estonian Academy of Arts and has received the annual art prize from the Cultural Endowment of Estonia. Farkas has participated in a large number of exhibitions since 1998, including Intimate Immensity (Musterzimmer, Berlin, 2012), Beyond (KUMU Art Museum, Tallinn, 2011) and neverneverland (Kunstlervereinigung MAERZ, Linz, 2011). His recent solo exhibitions include A Day That Does Not Exist (Hobusepea Gallery, Tallinn, 2012) and Images to Words (Napa Gallery, Rovaniemi, Finland, 2012).
Adam Budak has been Curator of Contemporary Art at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, and Kunsthaus Graz, Austria. He has curated a large number of international exhibitions, including solo shows for John Baldessari, Tatiana Trouvé, Cerith Wyn Evans, and Monika Sosnowska, as well as thematic exhibitions, such as Human Condition, Anabasis. Rituals of Homecoming and Passion of an Ornithologist. Budak has contributed to two editions of the Prague Biennial (2003, 2005) and to the Venice Architecture Biennale (2004). He was co-curator of Manifesta7 (2008). Budak collaborated with Dénes Farkas for the exhibition Beyond within the context of the Fotokuu project (Photography Month) at Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn in 2010.
Evident in Advance has been developed in close collaboration with Studio Miessen, led by Markus Miessen in Berlin.
The exhibition is accompanied by a publication designed by Zak Kyes (Zak Group) and published by Sternberg Press. It will include essays by the philosophers, Daniele Monticelli and Adriana Cavarero, the linguist Martin Prinzhorn, the writer Bruce Duffy, and the architect Markus Miessen, as well as a rich visual report on Evident in Advance by the artist himself. The project will be introduced by a critical text from the curator, Adam Budak.
The Estonian Pavilion is located in the Palazzo Malipiero, San Samuele Square, S. Marco 3199.
The press conference will take place in Tallinn on 18 March at KUMU, Art Museum of Estonia with the participation of artist Dénes Farkas, curator Adam Budak, architect Markus Miessen, designer Zak Kyes, representatives of the Estonian Ministry of Culture and the Center for Contemporary Arts, Estonia.
The Venice Biennale is the oldest and largest international art forum, and Estonia has participated since 1997. The Center for Contemporary Arts, Estonia is the official representative of the Estonian exposition at the Venice Biennale. The commissioner in charge is Johannes Saar, director of CCA, Estonia.
The competition for the 2012 Estonian exposition attracted 13 projects and the evaluation took two rounds of meetings. The winner was chosen by a nine-member panel of artists and representatives from various art institutions, including Sirje Helme (Art Museum of Estonia), Reet Mark (Tartu Art Museum), Andres Kurg (Estonian Academy of Arts), Kaido Ole (artist), Katrin Kivimaa (Estonian Academy of Arts), Johannes Saar (Center for Contemporary Arts), Maria-Kristiina Soomre (Estonian Ministry of Culture), Christian Schoen (Kunst-Konzepte, Germany) and Jan Boelen (Z33, Belgium).
Estonia’s participation at the 55th International Art Exhibition in Venice is supported by the Estonian Ministry of Culture.
More information: Maria Arusoo, deputy commissioner maria [at] cca.ee.
Full information about the project at www.evident-in-advance.com.
