* Presentation at the conference at ICI Kulturlabor Berlin in July

Posted by madzoski on Thursday, April 29, 2010 Under: conferences

Conference: Un-titled: Affirming Negations - Negating Affirmations

July 1-3, 2010
ICI Kulturlabor Berlin


Paper title: Inclusion as Exclusion: Obscured Crimes in the Manifesta Archive


Manifesta – European Biennial of Contemporary Art was created after the fall of Berlin wall by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a way to accommodate newly discovered art brothers and sisters from the East. On the rhetorical level, it was there to promote democracy and transparency, while bringing the logic of the art market into new territories. I decided to start my research into contemporary modes of censorship in this institution, but at the very beginning was denied access to most of the documents of their democratic and open archive. Instead, I was sold a monograph publication of their ten-year history to perform my research on. Very soon, a particular gesture revealed itself on the pages. In the part entitled “Manifesta Archive”, I have discovered a being I have not encountered until then. Under numerous photographs, one or more of the participants in this history has been given the name 'unidentified.' Having in mind the short course of Manifesta history, as well as the geographical closeness and new modes of communication, this gesture becomes even more absurd. Nevertheless, through this detail, it became possible to locate the blind spots of Manifesta archive and history. As it turned out, the unidentified ones always belong to the community of the former East that hosted this 'European' art manifestation.

In my presentation, I want to bring this new being into discussion as a way to demonstrate the existing practices of exclusion through the rhetorical inclusion of the Other. Instead of censoring its presence, this strange creature will remain on the photograph, carrying a new name to cover the otherwise unpleasant blank space in the signature. Through this analysis, I hope we will be able to define better current practices of deletion happening under the guise of inclusion. In its own way, the discovery of the unidentified questions the true democracy of democracy itself. On the formal level, I would attempt to read this situation in relation to the paraconsistent system of negation. Following Alain Badiou, this might allow us to define the fall of the communism as a simulacrum of an event from the perspective of the former West. Therefore, we might even be able to talk about the new rule of included middle as a replacement for the excluded middle within this new logical framework.


In : conferences 


Tags: manifesta  art biennials  democracy  deletion  europe  ici kulturlabor berlin 

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