Bodies of Dispersion: Mechanisms of Distention

The exhibition is financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. The project’s partner is the New York Foundation for the Arts with financial support of the Trust for Mutual Understanding.

"Bodies of Dispersion: Mechanisms of Distention" examines the relationship between the singular body and its mechanisms of multiplicity in everyday life, highlighting specific critical perceptions and positionalities in regard to social, geopolitical, cultural, biological, and technological attitudes and systems. Informed by the Deleuzian concept of the rhizome, this show will address dialogical processes as both critique and destabilization of camouflaged monopolizing positions and structures.

The symbiotic relationship between the body and space in art practices is nothing new. What makes this relationship poignant is how each work distinctly informs the perception and reorientation of the singular body and the social, collective space. In contrast to a growing prescribed urban design whose aim is on trivial consumption, the presence of a collective of similitude has come to embody the global collective as an anonymous mark in the urban flux. This anonymity, however, should not intend to disseminate a specific critical presence and a voice. With this in mind, the aim of many contemporary artists today is to address this place of in-between-ness as crucial for a critical rethinking of social space. It is through the collective mechanisms of insertion, interference, intervention, action, performance and projection that artists have fostered contingency within public social awareness and participation. These mechanisms, originating in the language of media culture, have since their inception served as the official representatives of corporate society. Their mission is to simply market projections of excessive consumption, while monopolizing public space. The corporate monopoly of public space, which has replaced the “middle space” of dialogue between the people and the city, has produced an offspring: the concept of membership. Now, we no longer choose to participate in public space—we have been summoned to become members, to pay dues, to act identically, all in the name of entertainment, of trivial consumption, of a passive participation of culture. Our intention in this exhibition and panel is to highlight this “middle space,” to reclaim and articulate it with a growing discursive awareness, through artistic disturbances and interferences in space.

Jacques Rancière’s queries: “Are some things Unrepresentable?” and responds, “’The invention of actions’ is both a boundary and a passage between two things: the events, at once possible and incredible, which tragedy links; and the recognizable and shareable feelings, volitions and conflicts of will that it offers the spectator.” It is through “distance and identification,” between being and seeing, that reality and unreality become constituted. Simply put, some things need to be represented so that they can be destabilized within their own representation. In his video   “KR WP”   (2000),  Artur Zmijewski  shows the former Representative Guards of the Polish Army (KR WP) performing parade drills, marching and singing infantry songs, presenting arms, while answering questions about the importance of their act. In the second part of the video, the soldiers perform their drill in a gymnasium, still holding arms, but now naked, wearing only shoes and four-cornered hats. According to Zmijewski, “It’s a musical and a costume drama, and at the same time, a serious tale about a defenseless body hidden under the uniform.” The film provoked considerable controversy in the Polish media, a nd the artist was accused of undermining the image of the Polish soldier and mocking national symbols. In this work, it is through absurdity that consensus is dispersed. By arranging starkly dissimilar imagery side by side, Artur Zmijewski’s extricates consensus from heavily symbolic situations. The importance of the absurd is that it can make the havitual apparent by rendering it “other.” The absurd has the ability to reveal.

 Alex Villar’s "Catching Up"  (2009-2010) returns to the singular-within-the-collective through a sense of locality. Here, absurdity is spatially constructed. In this video, Villar explores the body as contingent upon its everyday spaces, always prone to a dramatic absurdity that only manifests through its encounters with others. The video’s point of departure is the moment in which commuters begin boarding a subway train during rush hour, with tensions exacerbated by each commuter’s disparate experience, recreating the situation through a different, almost improbable scope. One such situation is the unruly activity of train surfing found in some countries in the developing world, or its opposite, which in the mind of the artist, parallels the heavily regulated public space of wealthier economies’ subway environments. One can perceive the experiences of different spaces within moments, but time is always passing in the gap between one place and another, between one’s immediate experience and those of others, an unrepresentable co-appearance that disintegrates itself into a contingent empirical exteriority. In the words of Jean-Luc Nancy, “simultaneity is not a matter of indistinction; on the contrary, it is the distinctness of places taken together.” And locality cannot exist without a distended sense of time, since space needs time. And time also needs space, “the space of its own dis-tention, the space of the passage that divides it.”

 X urban Collective’s series "Evacuation #2"  (2010) explores the idea of global social spaces as they relate to their territorialized distribution, signaling a different typology of a specific built environment. Evacuation Series investigates mass produced spaces, such as offices, houses, martial arts and religious centers according to their common denominators across nationalized territories, involving designing, building and furnishing particular social spaces. These spaces are incomplete and function as a form of evacuation of some of their culturally recognizable artifacts and objects, revealing the ‘bare space’, its potentiality and its limits for democratic participation. At Arsenal, Xurban Collective will examine the Turkish mescid—from the Arabic word masjid (Mosque)—or smaller mosques built with cheap assembly-line style furniture, creating a sterile yet unfinished organic environment. These small, mass-produced mosques can be found in shopping malls, business centers, schools, hospitals, and apartments almost everywhere around the globe, although most of them do not officially exist in the architectural plan of the original site, taking an organic character as implementations of garages, warehouses, basements, or as temporary occupations in unclaimed spaces. Quite distinct from the sumptuous monumentality of the original Mosque, the mescid lacks expensive medallion rugs, richly crafted mihrabs, or elaborate artistic calligraphy. As it appears discardable and unaesthetic, it negates a traditional connection between beauty, knowledge, and spirituality. Nevertheless, its extreme religiosity entices a homogeneous environment of passivity and sameness. The display of the mescid in the gallery space attempts to strip the religious iconography of its symbolic paraphernalia, decorated by plastic stones and cheap rugs, the space instead emphasizing its connection to the global economy. Besides an overt economic productivity that creates both high demand and ethnic exclusion, the mass produced mosque is another ticket to a culture of membership in European and American societies. This membership status is intended as an antidote to immigrant stigmatization, while also leading to more internal stigma among immigrants who appropriate anti-modernist, anti-European sentiments, which are nationalist, religious, and patriarchal. This conflicted ethnic identity is then contained within mass-produced spaces that foster a temporary sense of inclusion. Becoming “collective facilities,” these spaces re-generate the same self-regulating, self-forming, and self-disciplining systems that led to their exclusion in the first place. 3 Between the dominant inclusiveness of the corporate space and the allegories that entail a ticket to an allegorical inclusion, “there is a total absence of transit, the tension of a polarity that inexorably leads to an irreversible destruction. The particles ceaselessly agitated by the intense movement of the molecular plane are never articulated in new social forms. They never constitute new territories of desire.”

In The Sacred Evacuation, by utilizing a politically charged religious space and transforming it into a “pure social space” by covering most of its religious connotations, the artists are inviting the viewers to peep into a bare space, a generic experience most art museums provide. The “whiteness” of modern architecture is devoid of meaning and lack of ornamentation. Xurban Collective consider evacuation as a particular conceptual operation, by which they want to specifically underline the potential problems of current participatory models, where membership based on pseudo-democratic associations dominates the political spectrum.

Elin Wikström’s performance and installation “…the need to be free…” expands on ideas of spatial discursiveness. Through interferences that destabilize the walker’s passivity, her work links urban design with consumerism. For the performance in Bialystok, Wikström will perform an interference of the urban flux that links walking between the gallery and the city’s closest shopping mall. Through repetitive walks and videotaping, as well as showing the video in real time at the gallery, the artist will comment on the geopolitics that inform collective fluxes through an increase in consumerist tendencies in social space. This idea becomes even more relevant in light of Poland’s current membership in the European Union, having led not only to the country’s recent economic growth, but also to its rise in productivity and unemployment. The artist explores how these shifts have influenced the articulation of social space. “…the need to be free…” continues the artist’s earlier performance/action held at the Dundee shopping center in Scotland in 2000, commissioned by the Moderna Museet Projekt in cooperation with Dundee Contemporary Arts, and curated by Maria Lind and Katrina M. Brown. The piece begins as a commentary on the gentrification of the city, after its main public square was sold to a private corporation leading to two major city developments: a new shopping center, the Overgate, and the city’s art center. The artist and her assistant, Elin Strand, took turns walking up and down the escalators of the new shopping center, recording 84 hours of video. At the end of each recording hour, one of the women would continue the performance, walking toward the Dundee Contemporary Arts, carrying a shopping bag with the phrase “…the need to be free…” The corporate appropriation of public space created a displacement in which the citizens of the main square became floaters searching for new spaces for their engagement with other citizens.

Oyvind Renberg and Miho Shimizu’s “Art of Cheese” (2010) introduces another aspect of spatial interference through divergent and yet parallel processes of cannibalization. Anthropophagy, or cultural cannibalism, is a Brazilian cultural movement initiated by Oswald de Andrade in the 1920’s, aimed at resisting adoption of European art and culture by adapting the ideas into the idiosyncratic mechanisms of the local culture, therefore blurring the divisions between high and low culture. The concept itself originated from local Indian cannibalistic practices in Brazil before colonial times, incorporating the idea of eating the enemy to absorb its power. In contemporary times, this idea has been appropriated by marketing strategies when the sales of a new brand or the extension of an established brand, or different branded products, eat into the sales of other products in the same line, creating revenues that are identified and justified by their extension. Here, the artists explore this concept through the dissemination of the signifier (the brand), expanding the object into its constantly transforming meaning, form, and spatial trajectory within the cultural circuit. In this work, the artists continue earlier interventions of the same title, exploring translation of social codes within a constantly shifting formation of culture. It is the discursiveness and motion of the cultural circuit that enables the mechanisms of insertion and dissemination to provide new insights into the processes of cultural and language codes. The idea is that every cultural object accumulates meaning and value, and cultural meaning is always in a state of flux. For Renberg and Shimizu, traveling becomes a performative act that allows the re-contextualization of culture and its reinsertion into the cultural circuit. An earlier version of the “Art of Cheese,” 2008, was produced in collaboration with the Korean band Fortune Cookie during travels in Brazil, and resulted in the release of the LP, Art of Cheese. The album cover, which also folds out to a large poster, is a collage made up from photos, watercolors, and other graphics documented during their travel. Brazil's global, musical influence is further reflected in Fortune Cookie's mix of indie pop with Brazilian bossa nova, including musicians from Rio, Oslo and Seoul. The LP is distributed within both the art and music communities, feeding back into the cultural loop that inspired it. The artists also created a series of tableware porcelain at Figgio’s earthenware factory at Stavanger, Norway, a project for Stavanger European Capital of Culture. This series features motifs from the Art of Cheese album cover. At Galleria Arsenal, “Art of Cheese” revolves around the LP, its music, lyrics, cover art, and the Rio porcelain made as an extension of the album cover, all presented as an audio-visual diary from the artists’ travels. The entire installation becomes an interactive playing lounge, encouraging the audience to play the LP, relaxing on beanbags, and engaging with the materials on an individual basis. It is through this “snowballing” strategy in which objects, ideas, and actions are coded, recoded, and decoded that they redefine the corporate circuit that they are part of.

Eteam’s “The First Life is a bad place to live, but a good place to decay. The Second Life is a good place to live but a bad place to decay” (2010) addresses the issue of otherness and being otherwise, a space of being outside the frame of character, time, and causality. One could define Second Life as a reflection of our living reality, a kind of model to articulate the game of signifiers without the signified. In its connection to otherness it can also suggest a less-than-human existence, a negative space from which to reconsider a space that difference becomes indifferent, or better, a “Non-indifference,” a double negation that, according to Levinas, “paves a way for itself where nothing is common.” Eteam’s installation at Arsenal Gallery consists of a platform with several monitors depicting everyday objects in Second Life. The objects, which were disposed by Bialystok residents and selected for this project, include furniture, toys, packaging, food, decoration, vehicles, kitchen supplies, clothing, etc. Each object is paired with a monitor or TV screen that shows a recording of an almost identical object slowly rotating in a parallel three-dimensional universe, called Second Life. The recorded object is in a state of decay, a fact that is indicated by a “percentage of decay” number that hovers above the rotating object. All the real life objects disposed by Bialystok residents for this installation will be reproduced into digital photographs and selected after the artists have located these objects already in Second Life. Even though there is no lifespan in SL, only six hours of daylight and three hours of night which serve as a structure to the virtual life, eteam’s SL Dumpster serves as a place for the displacement of objects in a virtual world that does not allow decay, a kind of archival system that works against the preservation of objects, highlighting instead the transitory condition of things through the representation of immediate time. Therefore, the meaning derived from these commodities—and visuals are also commodities—are inscribed in their forms, uses, and trajectories. For an owner of an original, copies need to be created so the object can continue circulating in the world of objects. What is collective about this process is the fact that copies are created in order to maintain an interconnection between people through objects. The SL Dumpster then becomes a social space where communication is mediated by alterity.

Spurse’s “Engines of Dispersal: Seeding the Premises” (2010) begins with the now globally ubiquitous apple seed. Each apple seed holds within itself a unique and individual possibility of forming a new apple species. It is a pure difference engine, as each seed’s genetic material is a full variation from its source tree. To maintain the continuity of a variety, the apple tree is held in a static relationship with the farmer via grafting and cloning. We entangle with these cross species alliances every time we eat an apple. To allow a seed to propagate is to invite emergent farmers, both human and non-human, to participate in the experimentation of that seed’s potential fruiting. This project will take the form of mundane everyday apple seed distribution systems. Bars of soap, building mortar and plaster, earth to add to puddles. These materials will be initially placed within the gallery, and are intended to be distributed beyond the gallery through a series of public exchanges. With the possibility of germination, we are entangled into a broad future of relations—ecological diversity, management practices, genetic variation, stewardship, habitat recomposition and economic diversity. The project continues the group’s collective work by asking “how are we of the world and not simply in the world?” It is their premise that the ordinary is better understood as a type of entanglement that implicates us in a larger ecosystem of social, biological, and cultural forces. These entanglements, when considered as engagements between human and nonhuman actors that produce a new relation, necessarily exceeding the metaphorical, the critical, the procedural and the narrative, while relying at times on the catalytic and animated forces of each of those. Spurse enters this proposition on that which is both ordinary and deeply entangled—the apple and its seed. The apple is at once part of an established system of stabilities—genetic management, global food distributed networks, technological branding regimes and metaphorical tropisms. Spurse proposes a series of interventions at Arsenal to directly engage the fluid set of relations the apple presents in the context of overlapping cultural, economic and biologic milieus. A distributed orchard awaits.

Finally, “Bodies of Dispersion” disperses into a multiplicity of meanings and encounters. It is where existing systems of thought are deterritorialized within the boundaries of the gallery space, allowing these systems of thought to become gestures, and to be decoded through constantly shifting contexts and experimental happenings. Every experience can only be meaningful within a collective. “Every becoming is a block of co-existence” and “A line of becoming is not defined by points that it connects, or by points that compose it; on the contrary, it passes between points… A point is always a point of origin.”