KARTA SITUACIJE / SITUATION MAP
25. 4. – 19. 6. 2019
ACE KIBLA / KIBLA PORTAL, Valvasorjeva ulica 40, Maribor

KARTA SITUACIJE / Situation Map is a group exhibition by artists participating in the artist residency program of the international project Tvegaj spremembo / Risk Change, who have travelled during two years to several European cities (Żejtun in Malta, Novi Sad in Serbia, Marseille in France, Budapest in Hungary, and Rijeka in Croatia).

From the perspective of seven artistic positions, the exhibition is an attempt at mapping and responding to the current, although historically continuous structural changes, with an emphasis on contemporary migrations and the complex, stratified forms of human mobility. Their causes and consequences, triggered and conditioned by the unstable geopolitical power relations, technological advancements, and environmental changes, have been the focus of participating artists, who respond to them by applying various audio, textual, performative and visual strategies at the level of personal, intimate, and collective experience.

The idea that binds the exhibited art works is related to understanding different forms of human mobility – from artists and unregistered workers, to the exiled refugee – as marginal postulates in contemporary society. The awareness and activation of the potential held by present-day migrations, as opportunities for exchanging knowledge and values that foster solidarity and generate new ways of decoding our contemporary world, coupled with creative mindsets, are vital for the creation of a new, modern-day social reality.

The conceptual points covered by individual artists are interthreaded into an iconographically and formally diverse vocabulary. The topography of emptiness alludes to the deterioration of value systems in contemporary society, and at the same time calls attention to the fragility of our everyday reality, which is navigated at the micro- and macro-political level by widespread capital accumulation, colonial appetites, and confl icting and discriminatory power relations. It is precisely these factors that dictate territorial and geopolitical changes, put up barbed-wire fences and build walls in Europe and the world, and change them, together with sea shores and river banks, into faraway and fi nal images of doors to (European) paradise.

The sonic and visual-textual mapping of the physical and social space calls forth bodily memory through sensory perception (listening to water, fences, walls), while on the other hand, it functions in terms of narrative and relations, as it opens up intermediary gaps in which a multitude of living environment realities are intertwined. The point of view is never the same, not through the vertical of social structure, and not on the horizontal level of relations between equals. The physical divisions and borders created and implemented by the offi cial, militant yet at the same time absurd politics of faceless fi gures in suits and ties, are founded upon a populist policy of fear and exclusion – the structural processes of diff erentiation, discrimination and exploitation – and upon an illusory rescuing of the unremitting crisis (for which the Other is always to blame).

Seven artists are mapping the situation “here and now”, visualizing, articulating and performing it on the basis of subjective and collective experience of mobility. From the meaning of exhibited works, it is possible to discern the now clearly crumbling democratic and humanist values as the ideological groundwork of modern society, which was established on the back of ever-repeating confl icts and violent tearing of the social fabric over the past two centuries. The frightening lack of historical memory and historical revisionism (not only, but also in the context of historical migrations) are made even more possible today by means of modern digital technologies controlling the biological and the mental.

Migrations and human mobility as survival strategies function on several levels in the fi eld of art, as well. Art is a means of disseminating that, which is social; the universal and the particular are, just like movement and change, synthesized right here – in the sphere of the artistic, the interdisciplinary – in breaks, shifts, interruptions, intertwinements, and often, voids.

Art is a means of disseminating that, which is social; the universal and the particular are paradigms, the synthesis of which is reflected right here – in the sphere of the artistic, the interdisciplinary – through and in breaks, shifts, interruptions and intertwinements.

Participating artists:
Nataša Berk
OR poiesis
name:
Simon Macuh
Eric Orbino
Vlado G. Repnik
Max Abend

All artists blogs and produced artworks can be found at official Risk Change Touring Production webpage: http://rctouring.riskchange.eu/

The exhibition is the final event of the artist-in-residency program of the project Tvegaj spremembo / Risk Change (2016–2020). In collaboration with the project partners, the residencies took place in five European cities: Żejtun – FOPSIM, Foundation for the Promotion of Social Inclusion in Malta (MT), Novi Sad – MSUV :: МСУВ Muzej savremene umetnosti Vojvodine (RS), Marseille – ZINC , Arts et Cultures Numériques (FR), Budapest – ACAX Agency for Contemporary Art Exchange (HU), and Rijeka – MMSU Muzej moderne i suvremene umjetnosti (HR).
Project RISK CHANGE (2016–2020) is co-financed by the Creative Europe program of the European Union.
ACE KIBLA is co-financed by the Municipality of Maribor and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia.