Komanická, Ivana: See You There

Text to exhibition 10x10 EU Kongress in Breslau

“So see you there” comes as a reply after one sees the work “A Trip to Imperial Capital” within the context of cultural congress tourism. Here the collective from Vienna (Eduard Freudmann, Ivan Jurica and Ivana Marjanović) has critically analyzed the neo-colonial aspirations of a private capital in Central Europe after 1989. Foundations like Soros, transit or Erste have adopted and re-written the history and geography of Central Europe. The impact of a private capital has resulted not only in the way the art has been (re)presented but also in the changes of economic conditions and thus a life situation of an artist here whose everyday life is now confronted with low-budgets exhibitions, individualism through a competitive grant system, a limitless flexibility and above all with a voluntary work, vocabulary of which has been appropriated by a private business as the generation of new profits.

The exhibition will address the social inequalities and injustice (re)produced within a contemporary art system and the artists as a group that is highly susceptible to poverty, exclusion and violence. The human rights agenda has been used as a critical tool for the resistance to neoliberalism. Compassion and solidarity as the alternatives to the power of money govern Beuys project of Free International University, an organizational place of a research, work and communication that is meant not only to supplement the state educational system but also campaign for legal equality. A German artist U We Claus who worked with Beuys on the Kassel Documenta planting 7000 oaks will do his meditations “The Fourfold Mandala Offering to the Bodhisattva Green Tara” every morning during the Congress in the Japanese Garden, while his collaborator from FIU Amorbach (founded in 2011) Anna Tretter will show the archive of a forgotten Weimar Republic intellectual Erich Everth whose theoretical work on the Media were reflected in his open critique of Nazism as a journalist and will speak to his great-grand son.

The violation of human rights in the Central Europe is often ignored as the domestic law is devastated and as other areas of public life it, too, is marked by the increasing power of private subjects. The new forms of public-private law subjects have been established like that of executor that was given many responsibilities within civil court proceedings previously in the agenda of the courts. When a Slovak artist Milan Adamčiak lost his job and found in the financial difficulties he very quickly became dispossessed by the executor and lost his home. In a non-existent institutional framework for the artist in peril, a Slovak artist Michal Murin appropriates the gallerist position working for the artist/friend describing his project on altruism in the terms of arttruism.

Just a very recent trial of a Hungarian artist János Sugár, when he was condemned to 5 months in jail, with two years probation for his public work criticizing the financing of private art institutions with public subsidy (the pretext was a vandalism) proved that the artist is guaranteed a freedom and is protected by law unless he/she touches the capital. In Wroclaw the visitors will be able to see his “Wash your dirty money with my art” re-contextualized.
Artists: Janos Sugar, Michal Murin, Milan Adamčiak; Anna Tretter and U We Claus (Free International University Amorbach); Eduard Freudmann, Ivan Jurica, Ivana Marjanovic – an artistic collective from Vienna, whose work is based on the shared values, practice, studies and history.

Text and curated by Ivana Komanická