Letter & Event explores the complex
relationship between local experience and global perspectives
on the one
hand, and contemporary reality and fiction on the other. The
art works involve both existential and socio-political issues
and highlight literal experience, often in the form of events
and pseudo-scientific projects. At the same time that they
deal with the effects of signification and new technologies
on the understanding of "reality", they evoke otherwise
compromised concepts like presence and authenticity, trust
and empathy.
This attitude can often be found on the relative peripheries,
in the middle of marginalized and privileged cultures. This
"in-between-position" is
intriguing in many ways, not least because of its potential
to intertwine the local and the global, usually with a local
bias. Letter & Event thus focuses less
on a theme, and more on a set of related attitudes and methods
and how they are played out and given form in the art work.
Literalizing
the link between art and real life, as well
as stressing the function of the relative periphery , Letter & Event takes the form of a rhizome with some of the artists showing/working
in the gallery and the other half in various places in town.
Some of the pieces change during the course of the exhibition
and some are restricted to a shorter period of time. For
example, Douglas Gordon and Rirkrit Tiravanija will set up
an American
version of the Cinéma Liberté/Bar Lounge, formerly
shown in Montpellier and Rotterdam, where they invite people
to have a drink and watch movies which have been censored
in the U.S. |