Miki Kratsman at White Space, Zurich
ReCoCo: Resignation/Corruption/Conspiracy
Life Under Representational Regimes
Curated by Siri Peyer and Joshua Simon
Opening: Friday, February 4th, 2011 at 18:00
Miki Kratsman and Boaz Arad, 21:40, 2002, video work
“The crisis of the nation state and national sovereignty corresponds to a crisis of the modern theories of government”
Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt Commonwealth , 2009
The exhibition ReCoCo: Resignation/Corruption/Conspiracy – Life Under Representational Regimes comes at a time of shared understanding that the political devices that have been established since the beginning of modern democracy after the French revolution and especially since the end of World War II, namely those of liberal democracies, are in a deepening crisis.
Conspiracy and corruption have become the way we understand the political. Political truth arrives in the form of a conspiracy theory. Governance appears as corruption. As we are subjected to a politics of representation in two ways – one is the system of representing politics (“the media”) and the other is that of political representation (“democracy”). Therefore, we find ourselves to be both the sovereign (“The people”) and the audience of spectators. This dual status is expressed in a series of paradoxes: political resignation has become a new form of agency; ignorance has become our political knowledge; passivity has turned to be our political activism. And so, we read images in the media; photos, captions, headlines, and news stories, in a paranoid way. The “CNN effect” of 24/7 live TV broadcasts produces a constant disbelief. The same question always rises: “where did this image come from? Who brought it to my knowledge? Why am I seeing this?”
The artists in ReCoCo – Life Under Representational Regimes are engaged with questioning truth regimes and representational governments, experimenting with the performance of representations and the inactivity embedded in contemporary parliamentary regimes, dealing with spectacle and conspiracy, political spaces of appearance and political resignation, corruption and governance, live TV and dead democracy.
