I
An exhibition in three acts
Act three
I Performative Ontology
22 september-12 november 2006
Secession, Friedrichstraße 12, Wien, Austria,
Act two I Já, Futura Center for Contemporary Art, Prague 30 May 2006 – 18 August 2006
Act one I Narrow FocusTake it Personally, Tranzit workshops, Bratislava, 29 June 2005-14 August 2005
Act three is divided in three parts
I Set-up 21 Sept. 7 Oct.
II Confrontation 8 Oct. 25 Oct.
III Resolution 26 Oct. 12 Nov.
Bas Jan Ader, Fikret Atay, Johanna Billing, Pavel Braila, Lolou Chérinet, Martin Creed, Alan Currall, Omer Fast, Stano Filko, Lise Harlev, Saskia Holmkvist, Jirí Kovanda, Ján Mancuska, Fiorenza Menini, Yan Pei-Ming, Ivan Moudov, Roman Ondák, Boris Ondreicka, Jirí Skála, Barbara Visser, Silvie Vondrejcová, Lawrence Weiner, Ella Ziegler
Curated by Vít Havránek
I is a three-act exhibition. It is an exhibition that took place in three locations, with a somewhat different constellation of artists in each, but its core, or perhaps the obsessive thematic sphere it contains, remains the same.
The third act of the I series of exhibitions is subtitled Performative Ontology. Ontology is defined philosophically in connection with the idea of conceptualization. Our assumption is that the term ontology means a specification of a conceptualization which contemporary knowledge systems that have a distinctly conceptual character are derived from. However, our intention is not to define this base for philosophical knowledge. It seems that ontology cannot be generalized, as it were; the moment it is generalized, it becomes a theoretical dogma that we can perhaps evaluate intellectually, but which then recedes from our lived experience. Ontology exists only in particular lives, in individuals, in the I in concrete time. Ontology interests us not as a verbal or theoretical dimension, but rather as a performative, temporal dimension; that is why I speak of performative ontology.
The whole series comes to its culmination in the Secessions exhibition titled I Performative Ontology. All the works in it will be present during the opening successively, in three acts. Some of the works will be visible during one act alone, others during two acts, and others during the course of the entire exhibition. Each of the exhibitions acts was presented independently of the others and the exhibition as a whole. Thus there has been an attempt to work dynamically as well as repetitively with the interior time of each individual work and on that basis to exhibit the interior time of the exhibition as a whole.
A publication called Autobiographies has been printed to accompany a series of exhibitions. Artists who participated in any of the series three exhibitions were asked to provide an autobiography. Publication is published by tranzit, Secession and Revolver.
The series of exibitions was organised by: tranzit, initiative for contemporary art, www.tranzit.org, Secession, Tranzit workshops, Bratislava, Futura, Prague.
Tranzit is an initiative for contemporary art supported by the Erste Bank Group, Ceská sporitelna a.s., Slovenská sporitelna a.s.
