25/05/2017
Open Call for "TETRIS"
Institute for Provocation Launching its New Research Project
Institute for Provocation (IFP) will launch the long-term research-based curatorial project “TETRIS” in 2017.In the upcoming one to two years, it has the goal of generating inter-provocative networks and working methodologies via cooperation and joint action between curators, artists, researchers, scholars, and IFP’s residency artists. On the one hand, from the point of view of institutional practice, IFP will develop research projects on different subjects, in the form of writing, curating, publishing, and symposiums; on the other hand, IFP initiatively exchanges these projects with its residency artists and curators, allowing the crossings and impacts the possibility of co-structuring our networks. The lectures, discussions, and exhibitions of related documents, images, and objects will mainly be presented at Black Sesame Space, IFP studio, and its outdoor space, however, the projects are also geographically in a condition of uninterrupted extension and fluidity.
In the book Classic of Mountains and Sea, where imagination and identification are intertwined, there is a fragmentary mountain that deviates from the geographical center which is named “Uncompleted Mountain.”We hope that “TETRIS,” acting as a new metaphor, will influence the packed accumulations in the contemporary world and break down the constantly strengthened reality; and to negate the inertial cognition cultivated by the systems of power and the conventional order. This negation will establish a connection between different practitioners and also allow us to speculate on: how we got here, the present, and what gestures we have in confronting the unpredictable future.
New approaches are required in order to deal with the falling “inertial cognition.” This process is an attempt to reorganize the residual objects again and again – like TETRIS, the popular game: individuals mutually mediate their in-between fabric –things that are the same are erased and the remains are constantly altering their shapes and structures, transformed into a temporary mountain. Therefore, within this process, there will be no pure individual and no disciplined collective. It becomes an endless expanding organic interaction amongst individuals. The building of TETRIS is also an efficient way of dealing with reality, fiction, and imagination, and it provides space for artistic thinking. These words will be given re-productivity as well, namely as a script or proposal, offering a database and theory framework for more concrete artistic production and practice in the following steps.
The project starts from the initiators’ own visions and their research subjects. We will explore the political imagination of the multitude in different social contexts and technological transformations through bodily experiences at play in the construction and deconstruction of many political forces, with a focus on the northeastern part of Asia and the Eurasian geopolitical background historically left by the Communist International movement. Additionally, we will research and discuss topics concerning economic/political issues, such as, “work and production,” “the individual and the ideology of social subjectivity,” and “resources and geopolitics,” which arise in the transition from socialistic collective production to a contemporary global neoliberalism-driven economic model, and from traditional industries (material production) to emerging industries (immaterial production).The presentation and representation of the concerns above point to an inadequate modernization – the embrace of heterogeneous contemporaneity and fetishization of “econotopia.”The exchange value and geopolitics that go beyond geographical spaces and natural resources are being reformed. Bodies at work inhabit a multi-layered space, interweaving between information and technology. They drift in between the real and the fictional generating animated illusions, while simultaneously displaying the insufficiency of economic/political development. As molecular parts of society, how are we shaped and controlled by the operations of its systematic, normative mechanisms? And in what way does this intangible information and data affect human living conditions? How do discipline, o**y, consumption, spectacle, and space memory affect our mentality? Under this consideration, what is the operational logic of the “heterogeneous” thoughts and actions of people? How could they survive step by step and internally change their strategies of development?
This project will be continued for two years, exploring how we can understand, by looking backwards, the implications globally of the current production structures and cultural transformations. It asks, what is the relationship between value creation and faint political power? Of course, this issue is closely linked to the contemporary art field. How are artists able to imagine a possible “exit” via their speculations based on the present reality? How do independent artists and alternative spaces alter our way of participating in cultural production, distribution, and collaborative processes? And in what way does geopolitics influence contemporary art practice and exhibition making in the era of globalization.
IFP announces an open call for artists, curators, and scholars if you areinterested in taking part in our long-term research project. Therefore, ourplatform will trend in a direction which is more collaborative and conceptuallyoriented.
Please click
https://www.iprovoke.org/application
for more information if you want to join us.
