Photo: Magdalena Rikanović / Drugo more (Flickr gallery)

Within the framework of Mine, yours, ours 2015 festival, Drugo more (The Other Sea) presents the “Networked Disruption” exhibition in the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka. Exhibition opens on Thursday, April 23, at 20.00h, and will stay opened until May 14, 2015.

Before the opening, exhibition will be further presented at Filodrammatica by the curator herself, Tatiana Bazzichelli, at 18.00h.

“Networked Disruption” exhibition talks over the interweaving of art, hacktivism and business by bringing together artworks and collectives that apply the strategy of “disruption” to generate criticism. Starting from assumption that every opposition against the system is in the end useful to capitalist mechanisms in generating new lifestyles, products and practices, or creating new forms of markets and consumers, the exhibition is conceived as an attempt to search for the new strategies of resistance that go beyond the mere act of opposition and that are harder to appropriate

Proposed works emerge from within political, economical, technological and art systems, playing with their power logic and generating virality, anonymity, semantic confusion, multiple truths, and disruption.

Presented works will give an overview of historical development of social networks and hactivism. The focus will in particular be on artistic and activist projects that emerged in constellation of social networks, bringing the existing power relations and the hegemony of major companies into question.

Global phenomena based on playing with identity – such as Anonymous and Neoism movements, practices of appropriations of names Luther Blissett, Anna Adamolo and Janez Janša as new identity labels, and collectives such as Peng! and Telekommunisten that adopt serious attitudes of business organizations in order to mock them – will be further presented by mixed-media materials.

Photo: Magdalena Rikanović / Drugo more (Flickr gallery)

Part of the exhibition will also deal with unusual artistic activity of groups such as the San Francisco Suicide Club, Cacophony Society and Bilboard Liberation Front, as well as the early period of the Burning Man festival which from the 1990s takes place in the Black Rock Desert (Northern Nevada).

Fighting for one’s own positions in the media space will be considered on the examples of international Mail Art movement – which has been based on creating art works within the mail network since the 1960s – and of Les Liens Invisibles collective, which shifted the idea of Japanese ritual suicide (sepukku) to the domain of virtual social networks, enabling Facebook users to deactivate their profiles.

Laura Poitras and Trevor Paglen’s video-works, as well as Julian Oliver’s installation, will deal on the questions of leak activism and exposing the surveillance system, corruption and injustice, of which the best known example for the moment is the case of american whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Previously presented in ŠKUC gallery (Ljubljana), produced by Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art (March 11 – April 3), “Networked Disruption” exhibition is a practical continuation of theoretical work of researcher and curator Tatiana Bazzichelli, who dealt with the aforementioned phenomena and works in her 2013 book of the same name.

Interview with Davor Mišković and Tatiana Bazzichelli (Moja Rijeka)