[Nettime-nl] SUB REAL | Opening Sat. April 5 , 21.00h

SMART Project Space | 1^st Constantijn Huygensstraat 20, Amsterdam | 020 427 5951

SUB REAL Reality Survival Strategies | April 5 – May 11, 2003

Work by: micol assael; mark bain; marco boggio sella; martin creed;
john bock; piero golia; cesare pietroiusti; santiago sierra

Guest curator: Bartolomeo Pietromarchi

Opening Reception Saturday April 5, 21:00h

Contemporary art must face up to the redefinition of the concepts of reality, experience and representation. In the contemporary era the concept of experience has undergone a profound transformation: the increasingly all-consuming media representation and the standardisation of models of life alienated by repetition have gradually eroded its status as reality. The spread of models of behaviour and aesthetic models subjects individual experience to standardisation and assimilation. This process has reached its height in what Guy Debord has defined the Society of spectacle, where “the image constructed and chosen by someone else has become the individual’s main relationship with the world”, a society, therefore, in which the mediated relationship replaces the empirical and phenomenal certainty of personal experience.

The unique, singular value of experience has gradually been replaced by a relationship with the world shaped in its collective dimension and standardised in its representation – constructed on the basis of mass, consumerist models – where the very “social relationship between people is mediated through images”.

The exhibition presents the work of artists who, by avoiding placing themselves in a position of competition with the predominance of the image and the transformation of reality into spectacle, opt for transversal paths, with works that infiltrate the folds of reality and bring to light its contradictions, revealing its weak points to suggest a different interpretation. In this sense the artist adopts strategies characterised by radical attitudes: secrecy, infiltration, parasitism, negation, excess. This sub reale is thus formed of the leftovers of reality, where the value of experience is restated in a process of radicalisation and of excess, the image is negated, taken apart and short-circuited, the figure of the artist is concealed until it is no longer recognisable. The artist thus takes on the features of a clandestine intruder forced to imagine and invent strategies for survival in the face of a reality that tends increasingly to limit and ignore the space for personal reflection and the value of the individual.

Every Sunday and Wednesday at 17.00 hrs Smart Project Space presents free video programs in SMART Cinema. “A Thinly Veiled Threat” accompanies the exhibition SUB REAL.

Sponsored by: Gemeente Amsterdam, Mentrum, Mondriaan Stichting, Brand Bier, Beam Systems.

For further information please contact Jacco Musper, tel +31 20 427 5951 or jacco@smartprojectspace.net

SMART Project Space | www.smartprojectspace.net
Exhibition Space & Cinema: 1e Const. Huygensstraat 20
Opening times: Tues-Sat from 12.00-22.00, Sun from 14.00-22.00 hrs.
Mail to: P.O.Box 15004, NL-1001 MA Amsterdam
Phone: +31 20 427.5951
Fax.: +31 20 427.5953
mail: info@smartprojectspace.net

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