Contemporary Arts
DEMOC(K)RACY #1
Daniel Knorr, Vlad Nanca, Mircea Nicolae
24 June–14 August 2011
Opening:
Friday, 24 June 2011 at 6:30 pm.
La Criée Centre for Contemporary Arts
Place Honoré Commeurec
35000 Rennes, France
www.criee.org
Curator: Istvan Szakats, AltArt Foundation, Cluj-Napoca, Romania.
Exhibition produced by La Criée Centre for Contemporary Arts.
With the exhibition DEMOC(K)RACY #1, La Criée centre for contemporary arts starts a new series of exhibitions produced and travelling in different cities of Europe. Curators are invited to select artists whose artworks question the validity, the limits, the exploitation or the transcending of the concept and practice of Democracy in our contemporary societies. Guest curator for DEMOC(K)RACY #1 in Rennes is Istvan Szakats, President of Altart Foundation in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.
"The exhibition analyzes democracy as a social practice. During the back and forth swing between direct and representational democracy society inevitably delegates a number of functions to the state and the capital (e.g. organization and control functions, standardized exchange of values etc.) and loses control over these almost instantly (e.g. bureaucracy, financial oligarchy, etc.)
The regimes of truth generated (e.g. the legal regime, market fundamentalism) regenerate over the head of society and create practices of monopoly (e.g the weberian State—holding monopoly over violence) that can be later hardly balanced by a lagging-behind civil society.
But, as all systems, these are also self-contradicting ones and have soft underbellies—and thus can be penetrated—not only to give them a jolt but worse, to question the level of credit invested into them by society. One of the ways to perform this is to overuse functions / practices of these systems (e.g. the political discourse, bureaucracy, etc.).
And of course, the other option (as the swing turns back) is to return to the very fundaments—the moral responsibility of choice of the individual in his or her relationship with another individual. The presented words illustrate / document the possibility of such practices."
Istvan Szakats
(Photo above: Vlad Nanca / Courtesy Vlad Nanca and galeria SABOT, Cluj- Napoca, Romania.)