Strategien in prekären Zeiten

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The exhibition Strategien in prekären Zeiten combines recent works by the Catalan artist Francesc Abad with elements of older projects to present them in a new constellation. Above all, there is the question of what art can achieve with simple, financially limited means born of insecurity at a time when its social existence has become precarious, and how artistic creation can retain the freedom to throw a wrench in the works. On the one hand, the title refers to the political and economic crisis and the associated dismantling of social services. But it also refers to an intellectual impoverishment in the sense that critical thinking has a hard time where it is needed most. In this situation, the strategy of leading a marginal existence in non-marketable forms of expression holds a potential for resistance for art. It only needs to return to it. “Ohé, partisans! CULTURE”, Abad hurls this call, borrowed from the French Résistance, at the culture industry today. The crisis of capital does not necessarily have to be a crisis of culture. Art can also get by with few means, especially if it does not present itself as a finished, gourmet product, but as an open process in all its fragility. This is shown by Francesc Abad’s portable archives of critical thinking, which repeatedly invite reflection on the questions hidden by the unified thinking promoted by the media and develop a very unique aesthetic precisely in the deliberately chosen simplicity of the material – another strategy in economically and culturally precarious times.

The conceptual artist, born in 1944 in the Catalan industrial city of Terrassa, is no stranger to Berlin. In 2010, his works Blockhaus and Winnipeg were shown at the Kunstverein Tiergarten as part of the exhibition Blindes Vertrauen. In 2008, the Institut Ramon Llull, together with the Instituto Cervantes, presented the retrospective block W. B. Die Idee eines Denkens, das Bilder erschafft, which revolved around Walter Benjamin’s theses Über den Begriff der Geschichte. It testified to the great influence of the philosopher, who perished on the Spanish-French border while fleeing from the National Socialists, on the artist’s political, aesthetic and ethical self-image as well as on his working method. Quoting and assembling disparate elements, whose collision can strike sparks of insight in the viewer’s eye, is one of the essential techniques here.

The works shown here deal with the concept of time and memory as a factor of biographical and historical, individual and collective experience. The effort to save the memory of the nameless intertwines with the question of whether utopian thinking as a design for a future under different, more just auspices is still possible after the decline of the great social utopias. (Claudia Kalász)

Curated by Monika Anselment, Miquel Bardagil and Magdala Perpinyà

A catalogue pdf with further information can be downloaded here.

With the kind support of the Institut Ramon Llull (www.llull.cat), Acción Cultural Española (www.accioncultural.es, AC/E) and the district funding of the Senate Department for Culture and Europe.

The exhibition is a cooperation with the ACVic Centre d’Arts Contemporànies, Barcelona.
Concept and production of the exhibition: ACVic Centre d’Arts Contemporànies and Ramon Parramon

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