“Inconvenient narratives” exhibits different provocative happenings where artists commandeer the symbols of different representatives of power thus exposing the unbearable mechanisms of action of the society. These situations problematize different discourses of power, expose their deficiencies and show how the human level can’t co-operate with the legal.
Narrative has a universal role in carrying on culture. The way a person situates him- or herself in relation to different events and the feedback that these events receive, determines the person’s position in a society. Only by raising a subject “history is made” and projected into the future. What makes a narrative inconvenient is its disapproving attitude towards power and authority that shapes and carries out everyday truth. To illustrate these tensions and conflicts the exhibition gathers together a selection of acts that originate in the art world but because of their subject matter reach out of it. The exhibition deals with getting caught between the wheels. Exhibited are artworks that attack these wheels and those that make these mechanisms of action work for their own good.
Prior to this exhibition the curators have detained from establishing a concrete political stance. This only seems so because by being public one is automatically also political. The exhibition doesn’t propose a positive program for the future but that isn’t the main goal. It’s important to discuss the difficult relationships between creators and authorities to expose these seemingly absurd situations as the human and emotional self-expressions that they really are.
The exhibition is complemented by a so-called archivist’s file that contains different illustrations including Estonian media coverage, reproductions etc. alongside with English curators’ statements that propose one possible way of reading the events.
Anonymous authors, Kiwa, Maike Lond, Ene-Liis Semper, Margus Tamm
Curators: Marika Agu, Siim Preiman
Exhibition design: Carl-Robert Kagge, Harri Kaplan
ISFAG, Põhja pst 35, Tallinn
III-VII 13.00-19.00
