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>redirect
16 / 11 / 02 –
15 / 12 / 02
Exhibition / Films / Talks / Performance
>redirect begins the last series of the haus.0 program within Künstlerhaus Stuttgart. The project moves through the material of the surrounding context formulated with the program’s beginnings in 1999 – as it parallel travels back from the embodiments of probable futures. It suggests the lines that separate notions of fiction and history fuse as a tenuos spatiality, that renders the type of science fictions required for envisioning a relevant artists‘ space identity set in the 21st century.
The space of >redirect is constituted by a speculative force field of attraction / repulsion narrated through a range of productions, several of which were realised within this institution between 1999-2002. The exhibition locates this range within a framework of practices, and from there organizes into various “constellations”, such that filmmakers’, artists’, historians’, or theorists’ discourse may be situated alongside to that of collectors, as seen with "Von Citizen Tania zu Patty Hearst" from the Schürmann collection.
Selected film screenings, talks and performance extend these dynamics through a specific reading of ‘mass media’, of early cinema identities set in relation to origins within national outlines, and in turn expressing cultural models of representational politics. Shifting from the space-time of ritualistic possessions through synthetical patterns of voices plotting a narrative still to be scripted, to the production of discursive resistance, a territorial flux becomes visible. In this way, the slippage immanent within the ‘seamless’ formation of identities reappears, set in motion by sociopolitical and cultural dynamics.
>redirect orients the exhibition space by two postwar icons, two recordings, that indicate the transforming of different Modernist belief systems underway, suggesting an unstable contemporary ethnography on the verge of the virtual.
The contentious
1955 film Les Maîtres Fous (The Mad Masters) by Jean Rouch
stands as one of the quintessential works of ethnographic cinema. The
annual ceremony of a West African religious movement, the Hauka in Ghana,
involves the participants’ passage into trance and ensuing possession
by a variety of spirits associated with the Colonial powers. Rouch was
commissioned by a group of Hauka priests to document this ceremony.
The traditional ritual recharged with the ghosts of modernity, suggests
a process of cathartic internalisation as a medium required for the
movement’s ongoing self-communication.
The 1977 Voyager
Interstellar Record was sent into space with the Voyager spacecraft
on its way to the end of the solar system. Along with image and sign
databanks, it contains a 90-minute sound selection, including a polyphony
of voices each sending greetings in a different language; Western classics
and indigenous music from around the world. Once Voyager leaves the
solar system it requires forty thousand years before approaching any
other planetary system. Project advisor Carl Sagan’s remark, “The
spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are
advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching
of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about
life on this planet”, suggests space voyage as potentially a ritual
ride and solipsistic cosmic mirror game, an ongoing self-communication
of earth to earth…
Away from the interstellar, remaining on earth, the artists’ space
operates like an interrupt switch for such one-way conversations. Its
role pertains to contemporary cultural production and artistic practice,
as a social architecture, part space station, part earthly estate: haus.0
– a program identity scripted as an unfinished interface, a dérive
-d institution (not institutionalized dérive).
This situates the artists space as a spatial narrative in order to reinscribe
anew within the project, the initial dynamics of the artists role in
founding other spaces within traditional institutional spheres.
