Productions 1 - 3
The exhibition series Productions presents experimental works of young artists and artist groups in an ongoing series that refers to current themes, following and developing them in the course of several months. Productions is an independent series that is being displayed contemporarily to the program of the institution in different exhibition spaces of the KW Institute for Contemporary Art. Productions is not a group show but follows the idea of a newspaper in various kinds like report, essay or gloss.
The main part of the works treats social-political questions as well as their esthetic implication and representability. A common branch of all works is the analysis of information-values beyond pure esthetic categories, implicating utopian as well as ideology-critical aspects. Without any uniforming gesture of critique and indeed militant, the presented works reveal the immaterial, invisible architectures of the social.
For the exhibition series Productions, the curator Anselm Franke has invited international artists and artist groups to produce new works and elaborate their ideas for the Kunst-Werke Berlin (KW), Institute for Contemporary Art. The result of this work will be represented in 10 single projects from May to September 2002 in the KW.
Productions 1 - 5
The immaterial social architecture is last but not least also an economic one. The enlargement of the market and its values as well as its laws about almost every section of life, and to make usable the new diction "Be subjects!" to the personality and subjectivity for small capitalist companies, produces a fast prosperity of representational techniques and the production of meaning. In the first two editions of Productions, there will be presented five single projects, analyzing possible thinking- and acting-spaces as well as their esthetic implications within the discourse of this thematic complex. Themes of Productions 1 - 3 are the real economic circumstances and the economy of the images connected with them. The dominating iconography is a commercial and fictional one that is being reflected and globally manifested in concepts like "Imagecity". With various strategies, Christoph Schäfer's film Revolution Non Stop and the image-lexical project Endcommercial® by Florian Böhm, Luca Pizzaroni and Wolfgang Scheppe (SBA) declare the readability of reality behind these fictionalized images. The work Planet of the Apes by the Bureau d'Études dedicates itself to the actor of the global production and their network, for which no images exist, visualizing this research in complex organigrams.
Productions 4 - 5 will be opened on 29 May 2002 parallel to the exhibition with works Francis Alÿs und Alejandro Gonzáles Iñarritu. There will be one publication for each project of Productions (3€).
The exhibition series Productions will be sponsored by Arte Fiera Bologna. Productions 1 - 3 will be supported by: AFFA - Bureau des Artes Plastique/French Ambassy, Volksbühne at Rosa Luxemburg Platz and Sony Professional Center.