December 11, 17h at Somn Bucharest.
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| 📷 Florin Flueras, Artwork (2023) |
Art Opening invites you to bring works (any medium), practices or just yourselves. The event might go towards exhibition, performance, workshop, intervention, or more likely, a mix of them.
In a world in which everything fights increasingly harder for our exhausted attention, art constantly “needs to be” more “stimulating” and “engaging”. The closer they look like parties, the more “interesting” art events seem to be. Boring, low or dead times are avoided at all costs. Art Opening 9 is a space and time for allowing ourselves to be at ease with being bored or even falling asleep. At Somn it will be fully possible and desirable to sleep on ourselves while presenting or attending.
If Stilinović was right, and I think he was, that “there is no art without laziness”, that art and labor are opposites, and creativity fully depends on having free, idle time for just lying around, the (art)world is in a very bad spot. Art looks more and more like “projects” and “production”, like everything else. There is a total alignment of art with work, and with the production society. “Inspiration”, “creativity”, “insight” are almost impossible, and that's why they are frowned upon. The frenzy of productivity leaves no space, time and disposition to meditate on implicit frames, perspectives and certitudes, and eventually exit them.
The production society is based on an intensive exploitation and exhaustion of nature, and of ourselves. Being at the point of terminating its natural base, the hyper active society “grows” more and more towards militarism, wars and necropolitics, towards the management of life and especially towards the administration of death. To have any hope of exiting the perspectives and practices that are currently dismantling the world and ourselves – the spiral of “development and progress” towards doom – we need to reclaim some free, boring, death time for laziness, for lying around, sleeping, dreaming. Not only in art but at the level of society, a move towards inaction, rest, peace is needed. It would also be great if someone or something put our production society to sleep.
Art Opening 9 is also self-referential by taking place in a venue that proposes sleep as a possible response to the production society and its imperatives – “Somn (sleep) is an art space for deep and relaxed departures, for falling asleep to artworld’s commercial, ideological, and spectacle imperatives”. Explicit and implicit limitations determine what kind of art is possible. In non-commercial, state funded art contexts, artists are more and more rewarded for conformism to pre-established themes and perspectives, for interiorizing institutional mindsets. This, together with the entire administrative bureaucracy around a project, can easily exhaust any art drive. The given alternative would be to embrace a commercial mindset, to do sellable objects, images, spectacle – to follow and interiorize art trends, trying to catch some art world waves. This may be an equally effective way to kill your passion. Even speaking of artistic drive, desire or passion might sound off, because a dry professionalization seems to be the implicit normality. In this art closure atmosphere, Art Opening 9 aims to sleep through all that, and eventually dream some temporary zones of possibility and openings at the levels of formats, contents and aesthetics.
With (until now): Alina Popa, Giles Eldridge, Eliza Trefas, Cosmina Moroșanu, Vlad Anticorp Solar, Adelina Moisoiu, Kira Valentina, Sibi Teodorescu, Victor Podeanu, Smaranda Găbudeanu, Florin Flueras.
At somn.space@gmail.com you can add your name to the list of artists. Or you can just pop up, with or without a proposal, at Art Opening.
Previous Art Openings