The Need for Practice – Tranzit SK

Chto Delat?
ex artists’ collective
h.arta
Jana Kapelová
Opustená (re)kreácia / Abandoned (re)creation
P.O.L.E.
Jonas Staal
Szabad Művészek / Free Artists
Verejný podstavec / Public Pedestal

Curated by Judit Angel

We are living in a prolonged period of economic, social, political and environmental crisis, in which the yearning for global, redeeming visions of the future has become increasingly frustrating, if not obsolete. However, it is not possible to live without expectations, without being able to imagine better conditions, a more positive state of affairs. And what if – as many thinkers, cultural producers and various practitioners propose – instead of heading towards fixed images of the future, we understand utopia, as a continuous process of becoming in which we participate? That is, instead of viewing the future as an end, a goal we should attain in an ever-delayed ”some day”, we actualize it in the present, perform it in the everyday?

The pragmatic and processual understanding of envisioning the future goes hand in hand with the necessity of re-thinking and re-working the relation between theory and practice, symbolic resistance and direct action, art and activism. Though (hyper)individualism is a key aspect of neoliberal capitalism, it is only in the last decades that social-political thinking has reconsidered the relation between individual and collective by recognising the role of singularities and differences in shaping common ground. The very idea of opposition/resistance to the system has undergone changes. Instead of negatively defining themselves by being merely against existing structures, today many initiatives develop their own projects in a self-sustaining and/or self-organised way.

more: tranzit.sk, FreeDoc