Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art
Pariska 14, Belgrade
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Working hours: 12–20 h
Closed on Tuesdays
CORCORAN
Opening:
Friday, 9. November 2007 at 19.00 h
Artists: Alexandra Croitoru & ST (Romania), Aleksandar Dimitrijevic (Serbia), Sagi Groner (Israel/Netherlands), Mladen Miljanovic (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Solmaz Shahbazi (Iran/Germany), Sean Snyder (USA)
Curator: Zoran Eric
Exhibition was organized in the frame of the international program Art in the New Field of Visibility: Amsterdam - Belgrade 2007, in cooperation with Vlaams Cultuurhuis De Brakke Grond.
Concept:
CORCORAN – Strategies of Confinement in the Age of Biopolitics
The late analyses of Michel Foucault were focusing on two divergent research directions. The first was the study of the political techniques the State uses to embrace its subject and takes care of individuals natural life. The second was the research on the technologies of the self, the process of subjectification where the individual is determining his own identity and consciousness while relating to the external power. At that point he shifted to the inventive and nontraditional analysis of the direct ways in which the bodies of subjects and their natural life are inundated by the power. Taking up on the problem of biopolitics that Foucault introduced, Giorigio Agamben suggests that after hospital and prison the very important political space where the concept of the state of emergency, metaphor for the new global societal processes, is exemplified in the camp, that alongside state, territory and nation is the fourth element of new political order. The camp is the space where the biopolitical aspect of power and control over bare life of the humans has to be seen because their political and legal status in such a space as deportation camp is being denied and thus their existence leveled down to its purely physical dimension. The camps in many European countries are exactly the spatializations of Agamben’s state of emergency, the model of power where asylum seekers from all over the world are being detained and deprived of almost any legal and political means to get a status other than eventual deportation. With the new political doctrine of War On Terror introduced by USA after 9/11 the state of emergency is exemplified by extra-territorial camps where the supposedly firm supremacy and control of nation-state over its legal territory spreads out into other “borrowed” territories of “sovereign” countries having as a result confinement of all “alleged” terrorists. On the other hand we are witnessing frequent attacks on foreigners by fundamentalists mostly in Islamic countries, and their detention as hostages and even more so their execution broadcasted in media.
The logic of the camp in the urban realm can be exemplified with the methods of socio-spatial segregations into both ghettos and gated communities where the later could be seen as “desirable camps”. The aspect of self-confinement related to the psychological feeling of security and protective control is what motivates the individuals to create such self-regulated zones of distinctions. This argument on macro social level would lead us to the notion and concept of CORCORAN developed by the futurologist Rüdiger Lutz who claimed that the terror-driven societies tend to create”safety-belt” environments as the enemy could be anywhere. The so-called open societies would be therefore tending to “imprison” themselves behind the material and immaterial curtains of control and surveillance.
The exhibition will be opened until 3. December 2007
Supported by:
We wish to thank:
Plan B Gallery, Cluj; Galerie Neu, Berlin
Photo on the invitation:
Alexandra Croitoru & ST
from "Another Black Site" project, 2006
Courtesy of the artists & Plan B Gallery, Cluj
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