SOFIA CRUZ ROCHA

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Kunstraum Niederösterreich, Vienna

Touch The Reality. Rethinking Keywords Of Political Performance
Group show
CURATOR Ursula Maria Probst
21 Oct – 03 Dic 2016


Artists

Tania Bruguera | Anna Witt | Susana Delahante Matienzo | Sandra Monterroso | Grethell Rasúa | Catrin Bolt | Fidel Garcia | Leandro Nerefuh | Akram Halabi | Markus Hiesleitner | Ela Spalding | Sofia Cruz Rocha | Dania González Sanabria | female obsession | Elvedin Klacar | Masha Dabelka | Pêdra Costa | Dudú Alcón Quintanilha | Giorgia Conceição | Kadir Fadhel | Jianan Qu | William Ruiz Morales | Naïma Mazic | Camila Lobos | Sylvi Kretzschmar | EsRAP

Pussy Riot, Ai Weiwei, and Theaster Gates: Famous names for art that aim to change the world through political and social interventions. With “Touch the Reality. Rethinking Keywords of Political Performance” curator Ursula Maria Probst examines such interventions – some loud and some also quite subtle – in relation to one another and in pursuit of today’s practices of political performance. The focus is on art from Cuba with Tania Bruguera, Fidel García, Susana Pilar, Grethell Rasúa, and Dania González Sanabria, but also artists from Arab, Latin American, Asian, and Eastern European countries and Austria are represented. Furthermore, the participating artists are invited to develop projects on-site. In 2015 Ursula Maria Probst curated the Austrian contribution to the Havana Biennial and researched the art scene in Cuba. [A]rt needs to risk even more than what, fortunately, it’s already advancing in terms of the creation of truly hybrid forms; beyond the simple exchange of signifiers and postmodern techniques among the "educated," media-related, and popular spheres, which retain their own speeches, circuits, and aesthetic-symbolic systems, while power relations and processes are placed in parentheses, as well as contrasts of interest. Contemporary art thus sometimes builds a vicarious subordination expressed in "cultured" spaces” (Gerardo Mosquera in „Touch The Reality. Rethinking Keywords of Political Performance”, 2016,Verlag für moderne Kunst). What effect can art have today and what means of articulation does it possess in the face of current fields of conflict? To what extent do critical performance practices affect a repoliticisation of our apprehensive global society and art and how do they distinguish themselves from the notions of political art of the 1990s? These are the key questions along which “Touch the Reality” has been conceived. “The mediatization of performance and action art transports the message of sociopolitical encounters in concrete space quite efficiently—and has triggered a trend parallel.” (see Holger Kube Ventura’s article in Touch The Reality. Rethinking Keywordsof Political Performance2016, Verlag für moderne Kunst). Action art and political artivism both build upon public stagings and the presence of the body in public space. This exhibition reveals how artistic works can assume a sociopolitical dimension and presents their respective approaches to an aesthetic of the performative. It comprises artistic practices conceived as a political intervention or as an action in response to a political situation. The Kunstraum Niederoesterreich accommodates this discourse; in workshops, it becomes a processual site for the exchange of questions, which also relates to the aspect of public space. At the same time, the encounters of people with different backgrounds shall establish new transcultural networks that strengthen segments of the public and their interests. In addition to artistic works, there are also philosophical positions that address the key moments of political performance.