Press Release
Is there a new “culture of rage” in the current economic and political crises and states of emergency’ When does pent-up frustration break into rage, impede individual and social diplomacy, and erupt into passion’ How can this rage be tapped for positive future developments’ ON RAGE considers both its horror and transformative potential.
Rage runs along a gamut of societal and social fault lines: from middle-class depression to loss of meaning, from war, repression and injustice, to increasingly intolerable modes of indifference and matters of survival. At the negotiating table in the exhibition (ifau, Berlin) researchers, intellectuals, artists, and activists from all walks of life will engage in a discussion about the social and political upheavals and ruptures at the Wut-Gipfel I Rage Summit.
They will explore traces and stories of protest and resistance, the visual language and legends of rage. And consider as well today’s “tipping points,” practices and techniques of protest and rage in the form of war, terrorism and mass murder.
The re-reading of selected texts offers new perspectives on the history of rage and anger. Authors, artists, actors, intellectuals and participants of the rage summit are invited as non-experts to read and comment on key texts about rage from Sloterdijk to Lao Tse Tung, from the Beat Poets to the Communist Manifesto, from Wallenstein to Seneca’a walk and renegotiation through the archives of rage.
Eight artistic statements protesting intolerable conditions, ranging from the “dead” classroom by the extraordinary Polish artist Tadeusz Kantor to Jimmie Durham’s unmasking of America’s founding myth in “Building a Nation”, to Regina José Galindo’s opening performance: her own gold teeth become the metaphor not only for the exploitation of Latin America, but also call forth associations of the brutality of the “Third Reich”. The works take on today’s global reality - not by reflecting or reproducing it, but by distilling its essence. Michael Rakowitz, son of Iraqi-Jewish immigrants to the U.S., creates from Arab packaging materials a replica of the Ishtar Gate (“May the Arrogant Not Prevail”), which in present-day Iraq has turned into a tourist attraction for American soldiers. A papier-mâché copy of a copy, since the ‘real’ Ishtar Gate has been located in Berlin since 1930. The work is one of four commissioned works created especially for this exhibition.
With works by: Shoja Azari (Iran), Jimmie Durham (USA), Regina José Galindo (Guatemala), Tadeusz Kantor (PL), Klara Lidén (S), Michael Rakowitz (USA), Reloading Images (Iran / USA, I / UK, Iran / D, D, Iran / USA, Egypt), Seher Shah (USA) and a specially developed “Discursive Architecture” by ifau (D).
Curated by Valerie Smith
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