Fabricators of the World. Scenarios of Self-will

as part of the Regionale 10 festival of Styrian culture.
Opening: 03.06.2010
Curator: Adam Budak
Project management: Katia Schurl
Head of cultural-scientific team: Elke Murlasits

Life and labor as well as the passion that articulates them are the focus of this exhibition. Here, like through the lens of a magnifying glass, the human condition is portrayed and expressed as the performance of an emancipated and autonomous self. Self-will appears as a mental and physical mechanism that shapes and conditions the identity of a social and cultural microcosm. We are in the vague space of in-between where the small and the intimate, the personal and the exclusive challenge the inevitable global and cosmopolitan quality of contemporary society. Self-will is the troublesome territory where togetherness and the sense of belonging struggle with the stubbornness of singularity and a self-centered universe, there where the communal desire meets the manifestation of individual belief and truth. What is the matrix of such a belief, what is the outline of such an attitude, what are the historical perspective and contemporary condition of such a locality, how is local knowledge being produced?

These and similar questions are treated by international artists who in various approaches have developed six projects to local themes. Accompanied by a team of cultural studies scholars, who have translated the project contents for participation purposes, the artists invite the general public to actively take part and share in the projects.

Artists:
Pawel Althamer (PL) with students of the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna (AT), Franz Kapfer (AT), L/B (CH), Christian Philipp Müller (CH), Maria Papadimitriou (GR), Katerina Šedá (CZ)