OXIGEN / APART Collective
14. 5. – 22. 8. 2021
Oblastní galerie Liberec, Galerie 1PP
Curator and text author: Viktor Čech
Poster: Matej Vojtuš
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Oxygen is a substance without which, like most organisms on the planet, we cannot make it. Environment, in which we can move and live our lives is inevitably defined by its presence. Although we are also shaped by desires to fulfill and justify our very existence, in the end the elementary biochemical reactions always have the last word.
The environment of contemporary art exhibitions is mostly still a place where we rely on the symbolic language of visual elements and specific criticism of the artists defined here reality from the surrounding mundaneness. In many ways these words, the movement of such a situation becomes a game and a politics, where viewers and creators meet at chessboard, in which, however, the uniqueness of the pieces is lost in a wide range of their colors and ambivalence of their semantics. The environment of art installations in which the viewer is confronted with a combination of outputs addressing his diverse senses, from image, word or sound to fragrance or odor are a characteristic consequence of such a trend.
Artistic realisations do become here a kind of biopolitical laboratory in which the communication is a synthesis of ideological discourses, speech of signs and our biology determined by sensory reflexes. This laboratory aesthetics, in which human society and its generated social and⠀environmental problems is a frequent researched phenomenon and patient, actually puts the viewer in a role in which he is both an observing factor and the laboratory sample itself. As quantum physics has taught us, this is actually an ambiguously inevitable position. The story that the artists want to tell us is a read book and oxygen changing into carbon dioxide in us at that very moment.
(Excerpt from the text)
ART HAS NO HISTORY 