Crisis as Ideology?, Kunstraum Niederösterreich, Wien

Various crises in late-capitalist Europe overlay each other: the financial crisis of 2008 was followed by multiple crises in a number of European states that continue to exacerbate the ongoing refugee crisis and terror threat posed by ISIS – to name but a few. “Today crisis has become an instrument of rule. It serves to legitimise political and economic decisions that in fact dispossess citizens and deprive them of any possibility of decision. … We must start by restoring the original meaning of the word ‘crisis’ as a moment of judgment and choice.”¹ Giorgio Agamben’s call manifests a certain urgency. The curatorial team of Anamarija Batista, Karolina Radenković, and artist Dejan Kaludjerović sets out to investigate crisis – the abstract construct demanding reform, collective effort, and austerity – “as a figure of thought” and take this as a point of departure for their exhibition. In the gallery space, references to pertinent texts by prominent authors ranging from Walter Benjamin to Virginia Woolf have been enveloped in a high-gloss packaging (developed in collaboration with Seth Weiner, who also designed the exhibition setting) made available for visitors to take home. Research into the origins of critical theory reveals that from its beginnings in the 1920s, it was first and foremost a theory of crisis. Subsequently, it had to respond to the failure of the workers’ movement and its idea of a proletarian world revolution; the crises of Marxism, which proved unable to explain this development; and the crises of capitalism that led to fascism.²

Calling for new ways of thinking about the concept of crisis, the curators tackle its dramaturgy. Anna Hofbauer’s title “Wo waren wir stehengeblieben” (Where did we stop, 2014/16) suggests the moment in a conversation when one reconsiders before one resumes talking. Following the strict chronology of analogue photography and its contact sheets, the artist proposes a narrative in each of the eight prints. The images were taken in Vienna’s Donaupark or on her journeys through Serbia and Montenegro and depict details from a timeless landscape: roads, streets, sculptures, trees. The inclusion of overexposed material disrupts the flow of movement and supports the notion of its own timeline, a narrative with ruptures that resists rush and haste. Miklós Erhardt’s video projection “Revolutio” (2013), a loop depicting the act of juggling three porcelain plates on three thin rods, also touches metaphorically upon the dramaturgy of crisis. The plates’ fast turning movement maintains an ideal state of balance in continuous tension, offering a comparison to the market economy as “an ‘external’ mathematically modelled system. A system that postulates the loop, permanent performance, permanent production, and permanent growth”.³ Markus Proschek’s work “The Gift” (2016) addresses the question of late-capitalist overproduction, the creation of value, and the meaning of a change in value system. Next to a black-and-white poster showing the moment a necklace is gifted hangs a shiny three-part folding display case showing the three different states of transformation of a semiprecious stone from animal faeces into a coprolite pendant.

The exhibition also focuses on actual conditions of production processes, reminding us that capital has become its own reality, one only barely related to the reality of working processes and resources. In her multi-channel installation “Work” (2011), Marianne Flotron investigates the configuration of the self within the neoliberal force field of a Dutch insurance company. As long as the project goal is achieved, the company offers free time management, an office resembling a hotel lounge with comfortable armchairs, stylish desks providing temporary working places, etc. On the contrary, activist and artist Hector Aristizábal articulates the ambiguities in how a “duty to be free” conditions employees toward productivity using the theories provided by Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) and the method of Augusto Boal’s Forum theatre. A completely different area of rein search that nonetheless serves the same logic of capitalism is addressed in Ferhat Özgür’s video “We Are The Builders” (2013), which was filmed on a construction site in Ankara and sheds light on highly precarious working conditions. Working for thirty Euros a day without contracts or any kind of health or retirement insurance, risking their lives as they climb the scaffolding, the builders narrate their stories in a very personal way, foregrounding their families and the necessity of earning money. Augmented by scenes of construction work, eating, and washing accompanied by piano music, the video offers lessons on a community held together by a very basic struggle for survival. Approached on a macroscale, this video reveals the conditions of speculative building booms as part of Turkey’s economic system; on the micro-scale, the work highlights the smallest unit of the civil society: the family.

Vlatka Horvat works from her personal archive to deconstruct family photographs of a past in Socialist Yugoslavia of the 1960s and 1970s. In her series of photographic collages titled “With the Sky on Their Shoulders” (2011), she tries to at least formally respond to this idealised socialist past by implementing the radical gesture of cutting out body parts or graphic elements, translating subjects into objects in a manner fitting our late-capitalist era. Three visual essays published in book format by Stefanos Tsivolpoulos seem to have been smuggled into this project; they question to what extent image archives can work against a hegemonic historiography and contribute to counter-histories. In Archive Crisis: Shaking Up the Shelves of History, Tsivolpoulos presents unpublished images and documents from various Greek (media) archives in order to investigate (un)mediated reality and the mechanisms it uses to generate collective memory.

Lacking a longstanding past, children do not obey the main narrative of history, but respond directly to the present. This is one point of departure in Dejan Kaludjerović’s multi-media installation “Mikado Spiel” (“Pick-Up Sticks”, 2016) from the series “Conversations: Hula Hoops, Elastics, Marbles and Sand” (2013–ongoing). The artist maps out a huge territory ranging from priorities in parental upbringing to the role of the media and the child’s social environment, questioning children on the meaning of terms such as guest worker and mother tongue. Kaludjerović also asks them about their future: what do you dream of? What do you want to be when you grow up? He recorded, edited, and assembled the answers of these children, who live in Vienna and come from different cultural and social backgrounds. The installation seems to ask to what extent the conditions of childhood predict adulthood.

Within the exhibition, the selected artistic projects do not illustrate crisis as such but are presented in their multitude of relationships and joyfully offer various strands to embark upon, leaving room to reconsider questions on the dramaturgy and impact of crisis.