- Zoë Poluch "As If"
For the duration of two weeks 4 artists will co-exist during working hours in the foyer of MDT, working alone but in parallel on an experiment that responds, resists, refutes, challenges, dismisses, confirms a series of statements provided by Zoë Poluch.
Truth Claim #1: We create meaning and vitality when our do-ings are self-valorized using self-determined criteria.
Truth Claim #2: We are in the same space and time and therefore fundamentally and necessarily affect one another’s do-ings.
Truth Claim #3: The holy trinity of authorship-spectatorship-objecthood is not a self-evident conceptual institution.This is not about public space. This is public time. Free from commodification and an economy of scarcity we inhabit public time as if it captured a new order, any new order, yours, hers, his, ours and mine. What can we do, what will we do?
There are three rules:
We do not converse about what we do, we do not leave the space and we do not use computers.Does art-making, world-making, and specifically our do-ings, glorify being in transit, always on a way to the next, to becoming another? Does this kill our fantasies and indignations to care about construing a work, a practice, a situation, a world with a different order? We will give life to a locality, while questioning and de-emphasizing the temporary nature of it. Well aware that there are infinite ways to build and ever infinite results of building we will commit to the as if model which is the basic logic of fiction. Our do-ings: our playing, working, making, performing, eating, thinking, being, dancing, reading, nothing, are enacted as if they incarnated a permanently other order.
Our public time is one of discrete attentions, of simultaneous but solitary engage-ings. It is a time of common yet heterogeneous purpose. There is no transcendence. We are here, particularly and specifically and this is where we situate and produce knowledge.
Do we see the aesthetics of decision making, specific to each artist or the production of a fifth entity that belongs to no one? Is this work? Is this the beginning of the future of ’a work’, her, his, ours or my work? Is this individualist communality? Is this performance? Is this private? What is public? Can the power of naming, re-naming and un-naming what we do, thereby unhinging identity, be used as a tool to un-do what we know or where we situate this knowledge? Do you have any questions? Feel warmly welcomed to come and ask them or produce their answers from November 28 to December 10 at MDT.(With and by: Chrisander Brun, Halla Ólafsdóttir, Zoë Poluch, Jens Strandberg.)