7. February - 30. March 2013.

Anca Benera & Arnold Estefan (RO), Olga Chernysheva (RU), Berry Patten (UK), Antje Peters (DE)

Curator: Simina Neagu

How could we envision a break in the endless succession of work and leisure that constitutes our everyday lives?  Are we able to identify the „lines of flight“ embedded in the seemingly impenetrable cycle of daily existence? And ultimately, can we escape the “atrophy of experience” induced by modernity, as Walter Benjamin suggested?

Perhaps contemporary artistic practice could provide an antidote to our impoverished experience, by disrupting the flow of work/leisure and the established regimes of visibility.

Simultaneously a space of authenticity and inauthenticity, everyday life incorporates potentiality and play, which art can help flesh out from this double dimension of the ordinary. With Michel de Certeau, we can identify the crucial importance of ludic  and subversive modes of appropriation tha may foster not necessarily a completely new order, but rather new ways of living and using the given.

Playfull appropriation is also the tactic adopted by most of the artists in the exhibition, as a means of mirorring and suspending daily experience. Art thus acts as a distorting mirror, defamiliarizing our own bodies and practices, becoming a space of reflection, a terrain where new modes of articulation are tested and verified. Other artists, however, choose to use the platform of art as a zone where the latent conflichts and confusions inherent in everyday life ar explored. Ingrained inconsistencies are brought to light in an attempt to resolve them. What emerges is a praxis or, more accurately put, a rearticulation of the ordinary – not the commeon equations of „art=life“ or „art+life“, but rather an art of life.