CONSPIRE ...

CONSPIRE… the transmediale exhibition, guest-curated by Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, focuses on the strategic notion of the conspiratorial act. In poetic reference to the term’s Latin roots, conspirare, the exhibition deconstructs the nature of conspiracy into a silent cosmic act of ‘collective breathing’ suggesting a sharply targeted, yet anonymous and intimate form of creative collaboration.The works and projects chosen approach the perceptive borders of our daily lives with coded instructions, exploratory maps and speculative allusions which provoke alternative views about the way in which we understand information and what we believe to beuniversal truths. As such, thematic constructs around the notions of conspiratorial truths, bio-organic systems and twisted realities emerge from the contextualising clusters explored within the exhibition.

Cluster "Twisted Realities"

Warping our knowledge of reality, these contributions act as reality-benders, rendering our everyday reference and sense of reality odd and questionable. They operate with the categories of the logic of fact and the logic of fiction as with two extremes on the same line of experience and thought that can be blurred: Einar Thorsteinn’s experimental object involving the public’s perception and imagination; SilentCell Network’s interventions into institutional frameworks; Janez Janša’s name changing as a personal act; Olga Kisseleva’s insertions of the immateriality of information into architecture’s concreteness, or follow the self-organised civil initiatives and their strategies of survival (Lisa Parks).

Cluster "Visionary Lives, Fictionalised Selves / Fictionalising Oneself"

Auto-fictions with the methods of projecting oneself onto a larger-than-life scenario (Mangelos’ self-fictionalisation and his visionary poetic manifestos; Ilana Halperin’s geological travel documentations and the visions of Artur Zmijewski’s protagonist, Lisa), decomposing the thin line between factual and fictive authorship (Hadjithomas and Joreige with the photographer Abdallah Farah) or the instrumentalisation of one’s own artistic position to create fictional institutions (Július Koller).

Cluster "Utopian Politics and Dissonant Poetics"

Soft, dark ... yet poetic revolutions are the key elements lingering in the shadow of these works (Marko Peljhan’s and Velimir Khlebnikov’s ongoing collaborative conceptual theatre of operations, YKON and its belief in the legitimate status of artistic micro nations, Bureau d’etudes’ engaged mapping of privacy), a state of being which may emerge as humorous dissonance expressing problematic social or political issues (Julieta Aranda’s sonic cacophony of national anthems; Hassan Khan’s psychoanalytical fragments of narratives).

Cluster "Bio-Organic Systems"

Uršula Berlot’s bio-organic systems mimicking abstract representations and Kimsooja’s physically and spiritually engaging experience on one hand, and Norimichi Hirakawa’s planetary constellations on the other, are complex projects that collude to link the mystical, and inexplicable nature of humanity and eternity, ultimately a search for something as elusive as a universal truth.

Cluster "Haunted Past - Projected Future"

One of the motives behind these projects lays in the poetic or revisionist intrigues of unsolved historical events (Société Réaliste’s agency for planning revolutions; Lene Berg’s personalised account of the Cold War and its propaganda). Whatever good remains from the fallout of misconceived technological and infrastructural inventions is explored by Laurent Montaron with his poetic reminder of the Zeppelin catastrophe.

Cluster "Alternative Science / Science vs Fiction"

Explorations into the limits of artistic competence in dealing with scientific fictions (Tobias Putrih’s sculptural proposal, inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s theories), documenting personal and alternative scientific proposals (Alban Hajdinaj’s focus on an Albanian amateur geophysicist) against collective ones (Christoph Keller’s assemblage of Internet-based theories on the mysterious forms of aircraft chemtrails).

Cluster "Conspiratory Truths"

Researching, unveiling and transposing (Trevor Paglen’s revelation of non-existent military practice, Alice Miceli’s research into Chernobyl’s caesium induced afterglow), converting and strategically misusing (Alain Declercq’s and Egle Budvytyte’s technically brilliant docu-fictions) either historical, religious (Matt O’dell’s new world iconography) or corporate processes (Bureau d’etudes’ study on the loss of privacy; UBERMORGEN.COM, Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico’s software jamming) link these works. As one of the central preoccupations of any successful conspiracy theory, the rendering of truth as a distinct plausibility leads us into a gray world of suspicion and insecurity.

More information: www.transmediale.de