Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Stalking with Stories





Stalking with Stories: The Pioneers of the Un-Rememberable

curated by Antonia Majaca and Ivana Bago

September 19 to November 3, 2007

apexart
291 Church Street
New York, NY 10013

Participating artists:

Zbynek Baladran
Alejandro Cesarco
Felix Gmelin
Sanja Ivekovic
David Maljkovic
Ahmet Öğüt
Artur Zmijewski
Katarina Seda


Stalking with Stories: The Pioneers of the Un-Rememberable

Giorgio Agamben, when contemplating about the 'un-rememberable', reflects on an unintentional memory and concludes that exactly this memory that doesn’t remember is the most powerful memory of all. According to the Russian writer and theorist Svetlana Boym there are two types of nostalgia: the first, restorative nostalgia, tries to reconstruct the lost root that nobody remembers, while reflexive nostalgia, which she locates in art, doesn't try to reconstruct a space or field of home but rather reflects it’s strength, power and time and it can be not retrospective but prospective. It is a thought of the past as a potential, i.e., it is about 'watching' dreams through which we can think about the future. In this equation, there is no rupture between past and future. This triangle between Remembering- Forgotten- Reconstructed is what the Stalking with Stories focuses on. The works in the show can seam like contemporary 'genre scenes' that (un)intentionally take up roles of nostalgia triggers causing, in Agamben's words - brief and fragmented awakening. The works involve navigating real and imagined territories and time - geographic, political, economic and social by revealing how the personal and communal forgotten or 'un-rememberable' construct the nostalgia of/for the future. Thus, the show that presents the works of eight international artists functions as an archive of parallel micro-narratives, expanding on the notion of derive - radical wandering of, in this case, a 'time-flaneur', as a means of touching upon different chronotops. The exhibition strives at formulating an unstable and fragmentary cartography where spatial and time collisions often result in conditions close to pseudo-modernist melancholy. Finally, it reveals how cultural mythologies are inscribed into personal Time-Space-Memory equation

Antonia Majaca & Ivana Bago are the curators of G-MK| Galerija Miroslav Kraljevic, a non-profit contemporary art space in Zagreb, Croatia

www.apexart.org