Kontakt - The name says it all. (en) - a podcast by CastYourArt.com

Kontakt. The name says it all

The art collection of the Erste Bank group focuses on contemporary art of Central and Eastern Europe, at which media like film and video were included from the beginning. Due to a lack of structures to back up production and networking, in the post-socialist states there was less exchange between the artists than there was with the international art world.
In the collection, development trajectories of specific practices in central and Eastern Europe’s art production are traced and their significance on an international level studied, in order to recover a part of the cultural memory and to create bonds between previously unconnected art scenes.

A change of perspective is achieved regarding the reception of contemporary eastern European art produced within local contexts, an art in which the historical and political changes of recent history are reflected in manifold ways - but also the transformation of the “West” taking place simultaneously, that has generated new positions of art in the light of current historical developments.

The aim of the artists is to transmit a message relevant to all of us, beyond being a mere product of consumption. It is not only a question of forms of expression but also about means of transmission - in order to tackle political, social and economic issues that would rather be kept under the rug by ruling powers.

The paradigm of subversion and the necessity to restitute their voice to the subjects is defended, as well by practices of popularization and democratization of means of (art) production and the subsequent exhibitions. These dynamics of creativity are not orientated towards competition on a market but towards subversion, therefore they represent an important antidote to the institutions of art business.

Currently the dividing line is not along questions of technology, critical reflection does not demand for democratization of the media but of the contents. The production of art and critical reflection avails itself of media as iconographic database, in order to generate texts and subtexts where the citation is left aside in favor of the implicit meanings and their variations. As soon as two objects or contents are viewed together, a new unity of preexisting elements is established as if through contagion, in which fragments of content recombine themselves within a new correlation - like words of a sentence.

The artists create, every one in his or her unique manner, new contexts that establish a connection between work and viewer, in a perpetual game of experimentation. Since the end of the metanarrative and of mythologies the rules are not binding anymore, and the artists liberated of their historical burden to “produce objects that enslave us” (Guy Debord).

No more is it necessary to find ultimate truths, neither questions nor solutions, no more is it about the individual against the rest of the world, nor does the end justify the means; indeed the incessant vortex of images forces individualism to reconstitute itself - within the process and not the outcomes.

In their selection and analysis the works convey something which was ostensibly absent beforehand: a hidden pattern of power structures and their representations. Nowadays the critical artist is like a kind of virus, deconstructing the original text in order to upturn it into smaller individual results. The ultimate political goals have been transformed into social events on a small scale - personal documentations about human beings and their era.(ca)

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