Mine, Yours, Ours festival presents: Oh, My Complex! On Unease at Beholding the City
Exhibition, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka, Croatia
OPEN April 10-30th 2014

Artists: Daniel García Andújar, Annika Eriksson, Michael Fehr / Diethelm Koch, Chad Freidrichs, Kirill Golovchenko, Lim Minouk, John Smith, Klaus Staeck, The RSA, Tuomas Toivonen / Nene Tsuboi, Michael Vahrenwald

 

In 2012 the Württembergische Kunstverein realized the exhibition Oh, My Complex: On Unease at Beholding the City (O.M.C). Now, two years later the exhibition will travel to the Museum of Contemporary and Modern Art, Rijeka Croatia. The constellation of the art works in the exhibition will shift along the new context which is questioning more actual conflicts in cities as they appear also in Rijeka itself.

The exhibition Oh, My Complex: On Unease at Beholding the City approaches the imaginaries, representations, and realities of the city from different directions: from the angle of architectural and urban constructions of the nineteen-thirties through today; from Europe, the USA, South America, and Asia; from the perspectives of art, exhibition, pop, and protest cultures starting from the seventies.

Along an open parcours, which connects exterior and interior space, the exhibition presents the works of over thirteen artists who have honed in on the urban-development, social, political, and economic lines of conflict within the city.

The works explore both the concretely built and imaginarily constructed city space. In focus are the ideological entrenchments of urban visions as they manifest in modernist urban utopias, in the models of the neoliberal boomtown, but also in those scenarios of crisis that have been inhabiting our collective imaginary worlds since the nineteen-seventies—not least since the publication of the famous report to the Club of Rome from 1972 entitled The Limits to Growth.

 

The artistic works touch upon diverse historical documents and objects from pop- and sub-culture contexts, including music clips, commercials or a video, anonymously published on YouTube, documenting a breakneck mountain-bike rally straight on through a favela.

 

Furthermore, the show takes recourse to one historical exhibition or exhibition display. It is the reconstruction of the legendary exhibition Über die moderne Art zu leben (On the Modern Way of Living) which Michael Fehr realized at the Museum Bochum in 1977 in collaboration with Diethelm Koch.

 

The exhibition title has been borrowed from a video performance by South Korean artist Lim Minouk.

 

 

Works in the Exhibition:

 

Daniel Garcia Andújar (1966, ES)
Let’s democratise democracy, since 2011
Installation with photographs, video, poster

 

Daniel Garcia Andújar carried out the action Democraticemos La Democracia (Let’s democratise democracy) in Barcelona in 2011. An aeroplane trailing a banner with the slogan in the title flew along the city’s coastline. The action was photographed from another aeroplane. Unlike from ground level, here the slogan does not appear against a blue sky, but against the skyline of Barcelona. When the Torre Agbar (Spain’s highest building, designed by Jean Nouvel) appears on the horizon together with the banner, this is a clear comment against trivialising the city with the notion of the Iconic City – and in favor of enhancing its function as a place where communities are articulated and constituted: let’s democratize democracy!

 

Annika Eriksson
I am the dog that was always here (loop), 2013
One channel HD video 9 minutes loop 2013

Commission for the 13th Istanbul Biennale Istanbul and KIOSK, Ghent

 

Annika Eriksson shows the video installation I am the dog that was always here (loop) (2013). The video, set in the outskirts of Istanbul, focuses on moments of transition and marginalised experiences of time, seen through the lens of a street dog. Having been moved by the authorities to peripheral pockets and no man’s lands outside the expanding city, the dogs are continuously moving along lines of gentrification and corporate city making. Through looping and repetition, Eriksson relates this process to an experience of time: exploring the present as a complex gap between past and future, one in which an increasing process of erasure, spurred on by a shrinking public realm, also removes other registers of being and seeing.

 

 

Michael Fehr / Diethelm Koch (DE)
Über die moderne Art zu leben oder: Rationalisierung des Lebens in der modernen Stadt (On the Modern Way of Living, Or: Rationalization of Living in the Modern City), 1977 / 2012
Reconstruction of the exhibition display
Photos: Michael Wolf
Courtesy: Michael Fehr, Diethelm Koch, Michael Wolf

 

The reconstruction sets out to take a fresh look at the exhibition Über die moderne Art zu leben oder: Rationalisierung des Lebens in der modernen Stadt created by Michael Fehr and Diethelm Koch for the Bochum Museum in 1977. This was a follow-up project of the exhibition Umbau der Stadt: Beispiel Bochum (Reconstructing the City: The Example of Bochum) also presented by Fehr and Koch with great success at the same museum in 1975. Taking Bochum as an example, they had critically examined the consequences of “segregation” of urban land uses – work, housing, shopping and leisure – while Über die moderne Stadt transcended the context of Bochum. The aim of both exhibitions was to establish a theoretically founded platform for the numerous local citizens’ initiatives running at the time and to turn the museum into a venue for current social discourse. Politically, however, the second exhibition was held at the worst possible time: two days after the opening, the abduction of Hanns-Martin Schleyer marked the beginning of what was to go down in the annals as the “German Autumn”.

 

 

 

Chad Freiderichs
The Pruitt Igoe Myth: An Urban History
Film, Color, Ton, 83 min, 2010
Directed by: Chad Freidrichs
Produced by: Chad Freidrichs, Jaime Freidrichs, Paul Fehler, Brian Woodman
Script by: Chad and Jaime Freidrichs
Music by: Benjamin Balcom
Narrator: Jason Henry

Interviews: Sylvester Brown, Robert Fishman, Joseph Heathcott, Brian King, Joyce Ladner, Ruby Russell, Valerie Sills, Jacquelyn Williams

 

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth tells the story of the wholesale changes that took place in the American city in the decades after World War II, through the lens of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing development in St. Louis.  At the film’s historical center is an analysis of the massive impact of the 1949 Housing Act, which built Pruitt-Igoe and other high-rise public housing of the Fifties and Sixties.  This critical piece of legislation also initiated the so-called urban renewal program and prompted the process of mass suburbanization, which emptied American cities of their residents, business and industry.   Those that were left behind faced a destitute, rapidly de-industrializing St. Louis, parceled out to downtown interests and increasingly segregated by class and race.    The residents of Pruitt-Igoe were among the hardest-hit.  Their gripping stories of survival, adaptation and success are at the emotional heart of the film.  The domestic turmoil wrought by punitive public welfare policies, the frustrating interactions with a paternalistic and cash-strapped Housing Authority, and the downward spiral of vacancy, vandalism and crime, led to resident protest and action during the 1969 Rent Strike, the first in the history of public housing.  And yet, despite this complex history, Pruitt-Igoe has often been stereotyped, with help from a world-famous image of its implosion, and used as an argument against Modernist architecture or public assistance programs.    The Pruitt-Igoe Myth seeks to set the historical record straight, to examine the interests in Pruitt-Igoe’s creation, to re-evaluate the rumors and the stigma, to implode the myth.

 

 

Kirill Golovchenko (1974, UA and DE)
7km – Field of Wonders, 2007
20 photographs (selection), carbon print on fine art paper

 

The series of photographs documents what is currently Europe’s largest shopping centre, situated on a seventy-hectare field seven kilometres outside of Odessa, with perhaps one of the most concentrated accumulations of informal, precarious forms of business. Consisting largely of sixteen thousand shipping containers, a two-storey shopping city has evolved that sells cheap goods alongside fake brands, all stored on the first floor.

 

 

Minouk LIM (1968, KR)
New Town Ghost, 2005
Video documentation of a performance, 10:45 min.

 

A singer and a drummer drive through the streets of Seoul on the back of a pickup. They pass by very different urban structures, some characterised by traditional markets, street life, or small factories. The others are dominated by the glassy towers of the New Economy: those latter-day enclaves that are growing up all over the globe out of the spirit of neoliberalism. The singer on the pickup bawls her chorus at the city, “Oh, My Complex! New Town Ghost!“ – making space for herself with her shouting and the action itself. The body appears here as a kind of final refuge of self-assertion and as a place in which (and through which) social, political, economic, mental and psychological relationships are located.

 

 

John Smith (1952, UK)
Blight, 1994–1996
16mm transferred to DVD, 14 min. (in collaboration with composer Jocelyn Pook)

 

Blight was made in collaboration with the composer Jocelyn Pook. It revolves around the building of the M11 Link Road in East London, which provoked a long and bitter campaign by local residents to protect their homes from demolition. The images in the film record some of the changes which occurred in the area over a two-year period, from the demolition of houses through to the start of motorway building work. The soundtrack incorporates natural sounds associated with these events together with speech fragments taken from recorded conversations with local people.

Although it is entirely constructed from records of real events, Blight is not a straightforward documentary. The film exploits the ambiguities of its material to produce new meanings and metaphors, frequently fictionalizing reality through framing and editing strategies. The emotive power of music is used in the film to overtly aid this invention. (Source: www.johnsmithfilms.com)

 

 

Klaus Staeck (*1938, DE)
Eigentum verpflichtet zur Ausbeutung (Property Entails Exploitation), 1973
For Wider Streets Vote Conservative, 1974
Und der Haifisch der hat Zähne (Oh the Shark Has Pretty Teeth), 1975

Zur Erinnerung an die Vereidigung der neuen Weltregierung (To Commemorate the Swearing-in of The New World Government), 1981

All: Poster, offset print, A1, printed by: Steidl Göttingen

Courtesy: The artist and Edition Staeck, Heidelberg

 

In these posters, Klaus Staeck exaggerates the political upheavals of the 1970s and early 1980s both ironically and critically. His allusions to conditions in Britain – “For Wider Streets Vote Conservative” – already herald the advent of Thatcherism and the social turmoil that it engendered. In the poster Zur Erinnerung an die Vereidigung der neuen Weltregierung – which depicts a group of suits, their heads concealed by oil company logos – Staeck spotlights those deregulation policies which began in the 1970s and, as we know, continue to have an effect today.

 

Klaus Staeck, Eigentum verpflichtet zur Ausbeutung (Property Obliges to Exploitation), Poster, 1973

 

 

Michael Vahrenwald (USA)
The People’s Trust, 2011–2012
7 photographs from a series of 14, carbon print on fine art paper

 

The series consists of photos of re-purposed defunct bank buildings. Most are apparently financial institutions built before the Great Depression of 1929 – at a time, that is, when banks were still founded on the people’s trust. The various “signatures” to be seen on the façades are indicative of both the erstwhile splendour and of the current use by cheap stores.

 

 

 

Referential material I / II:

 

The Referential Material I function like a “scratching” over several contexts which belong to the Unease at Beholding the City from unrealized utopias over the city as a surveillance machinery till the city as the spot of resistance, riots and conflict zone.

 

Tuomas Toivonen (1975, FI), Nene Tsuboi (1976, JP/FI), (NOW)
More = Less, video, 2009
Video

 

The video is based on the rap-style lecture performance by the architects and founders of Praxis NOW Architecture and Urbanism in Helsinki, Tuomas Toivonen and Nene Tsuboi. In verbal “fast motion”, they sum up the various urban utopias since modernism – finally describing their failure with the formula “More = Less”.

 

The RSA
David Harvey. Crises of Capitalism, 2010
Video animation

 

Animation of a lecture by US human geographer and social theorist David Harvey, examining the current financial crisis in terms of its political, theoretical, cultural and psychological implications.

 

 

Safety Compilation I
Safety Compilation II
Dream Hub
RENT IS 2DAMN HIGH, Jimmy Mack
The Valparaiso Cerro Abajo Race
Sim City

 

Other References :

Safety Compilation I/II, Dream Hub, RENT IS 2DAMN HIGH, Jimmy Mack, The Valparaiso Cerro Abajo Race, Sim City

 

Referential material II:

Tableau Modernity From Haussmannisation to the Levittowns , Tableau Slums From early industrialization to endless accumulation, Tableau Riots From the revolution 1848 to street fights 2012, Tableau Seoul (Eviction) Samsung killings, Tableau War War into the City: Tropa de Elite