Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Part of New Life Berlin, KUNSTRAUM KREUZBERG/ BETHANIEN , Berlin
10 May - 23 June 2008
Reviewed by: Claire Louise Staunton
A CURATORIAL COLLISION
HACK.FEM.EAST
KUNSTRAUM KREUZBERG/ BETHANIEN
10 MAY - 23 JUNE
PRESENTED AS PART OF ARTS AND CONVERSATION, 9 JUNE
Some days, following a breakfast of tea, toast and apples, I can remain staring at the computer screen until suppertime. Apart from a few breaks due to biological necessity, I remain linked into the tangle of online social networking sites which indulge my unhealthy nosiness and fuel my hunger for information. In anticipation of my involvement in the New Life Berlin festival as an Open Dialogues writer, I employed one of these online networks (Myspace) and landed myself a beautiful and tenantless flat in the centre of leafy Kreutzberg.
In a large green park, the arts venue Kunstraum Kreuzberg / Bethanien, is currently playing host to the exhibition Hack.Fem.East, as part of the New Life Berlin festival. Hack.Fem.East is an exhibition that involves female artists from Eastern Europe using the internet to express themselves or to facilitate their political activism. A public presentation by the exhibition curators, Tatiana Bazzichelli and Gaia Novati, on 9th June gave visitors a comprehensive overview of the concepts of network theory they are working with and how this theory is employed curatorially to create another network, one that is manifested physically in the exhibition format.
Often, the online social networks I have joined thanks to peer pressure or simply curiosity evolve into real human interaction. In particular, the virtual relationships with artists and writers that I cultivated through transatlantic email dialogues came to fruition at the New Life Berlin festival when I could finally locate my knowledge about a person in their face directly in front of me. Here in Berlin, my delicate online networks have now evolved into strong personal relationships built from shared experiences and personal exchanges.
Hack.Fem.East is in a warren of an exhibition hall with 14 different rooms, involving 32 different female artists or independent activist groups lead by women. Each of the artists or groups bring with them their own networks and the curators see the whole project as a ‘network of networks’ situated each in their own separated spaces but linked through corridors and doorways. The presentation given by the Bazzichelli and Novati was a choreographed dance over a chalk drawn map of the exhibition, a dislocated performance to demonstrate physically the commonalities between the different artists, which justified it as a network and exposed the slippery role of a curator. Within the network paradigm, it is difficult to place the curators’ position as they do not stand alone as their own entity, rather they act as negotiators and brokers for relationships, all the while acting like grease on the networking wheels, to enable the machine to operate smoothly.
Themes of prostitution and the trafficking of eastern European women as wives for western European men are recurrent around the exhibition, found in parodist photographs by Alla Georgieva’s project, ‘BG Souvenirs’ and Anna Krenz’s ‘Polish Wife’ interactive installation. Highlighting the relationships and networks between the different artists and groups in Hack.Fem.East also focuses in on shared topics such as open source and intellectual property rights, including Nada Prelja’s ‘Give to Take’ research project on the exploitation of artistically produced images, in which the visitor is given the opportunity to burn a copyright free music CD from the City of Women online platform.
But sometimes, when networks hanging in the ether turn into real life confrontations, the meetings of nodes can be destructive and unpleasant. At a recent birthday party, I invited dozens of people, each from different periods in my life and from varied geographical locations. Acting as a broker between groups who had little common elements apart from a friendship with me, I attempted to find more links between the different people. I felt overwhelmed by this task at my own birthday party and learned only a few days later that a violent argument had erupted on the dance floor due to a simple misunderstanding between the different and self contained groups.
And, I do feel that elements of Hack.Fem.East are much like a difficult birthday party with the two curators acting as brokers between these often extremely distant nodes who share very little apart from their gender and global situation. As a result, some of the best works become lost in the multitude of installations, which feel like they are positioned in competition with each other. ‘Kits’ by Anetta Mona Chisa and Lucia Tkacova is a reminder of the American artist Christine Hill but this work is distinctly Slovakian. Boryana Rossa’s ‘A Garden of One’s Own’ is a beautiful installation questioning the current Bulgarian economic situation and its relationship with global economy through gardening. These projects - among a handful of others in Hack.Fem.East - should stand out, but lose their own identity because of the insistence of curatorial themes of networks and politics rather than the independent pieces of work.
Exploring Hack.Fem.East alone, following the presentation by curators Bazzichelli and Novati, I consolidate my own knowledge of the exhibition from reading about it online, with the sensations of actually having been in the space. And in doing so, I come to realise that the new network the curators hope to achieve is enacted through my performance of the exhibition - my wandering from space to space, linking common threads between the artworks and my own personal references within an artistic context or a more personal one. I believe that the visitor’s enjoyment and engagement with the Hack.Fem.East exhibition is dependent on their willingness to search for these links in their own knowledge and history. However the curators have a two fold objective for the Hack.Fem.East networked exhibition, not only is the public’s consideration key to its success, perhaps more importantly, is that it ‘provides and develops’ a network platform in the present and into the future. The exhibition acts not as a physical representation of an existing network but rather creates one in real time and space with the ambition that this will continue indefinitely. As a curatorial project, Hack.Fem.East is a fascinating format with commonalities and collisions in equal measure but when the artworks come down and the doors close the success of the project will be achieved if the network can leap from the physical back into the virtual.
Each evening, when I temporarily disengage myself from the multitude of online networks, I meet my friends or ‘nodes’ in real time. I move comfortably from one reality to another secure in the thought that my own links between on and off line are doubly strong. The representation of such links - either through a large and complicated birthday party or a maze-like exhibition- can be both exciting and problematic but it is here that virtual and physical networks can begin to unravel. The ultimate responsibility for success lies with the brokers, matchmakers, wheel greasers or, curators.
By Claire Louise Staunton
Hack.Fem.East is an exhibition and events programme curated by Tatiana Bazzichelli and Gaia Novati from the 10 May to 22 June at the Kunstraum Kreuzberg / Bethanien. A presentation by the curators was part of the New Life Berlin programme ‘Arts and Conversation’
www.hackfemeast.org
www.wooloo.org/artsandconversation
Please only reproduce this text with permission from opendialogues@gmail.com and the author.
claire@inheritanceprojects.org |
Venue detail:
Part of New Life Berlin, KUNSTRAUM KREUZBERG/ BETHANIEN
KUNSTRAUM KREUZBERG/ BETHANIEN
Berlin, Germany
www.hackfemeast.org
No one has commented on this article yet, why not be the first?
To post a comment you need to login
Back to top