You won't feel a thing

YOU WON'T FEEL A THING: On Panic, Obsession, Rituality and Anesthesia Curated by Aneta Szylak

2 June- 15 September 2007
OPENING: FRIDAY 1 June, 7 pm
Wyspa Institute of Art is open from tuesday to sunday from 12.00-18.00.
States of uncertainty, undefined fears, rapid perceptual cracks, irrational behaviours, unshaped longings for the relief that never comes or does not come on time. Self-aggressions, medications, meditations and anaesthetic replacements. The rituals with no reason, needs with no desires. Obsessions of unclear origin and panic attacks impossible to cure. You won’t feel the thing captures the state of mind of the individual under the pressure of contemporary reality. Shaped by success and its weak foundations, post-therapeutic, globalised and medialised, this reality enforces a rational approach to life and privileges the so-called “social” and “professional” behaviour. This is the reality of fraudulent, stimulated, collective reactions, of false prophets and failed social projects, marked by crises of both rationality and spirituality. Personal feelings are channelled and manipulated by social, psychological and economic pressures. The systems of knowledge production let us have it to a certain degree under control.

In reaction to this situation, overwhelmed by panic, obsession or the desire for anaesthesia, individuals perform personal rituals that extend, suspend or freeze time to allow themselves to experience their private selves. Ignoring the all-pervasive social relations that generally frame and inform the self, this exhibition looks inward to focus on internal and personal reality. It tracks the uncertain sensations, perceptual gaps and slight cracks in reality. It approaches fear on the level on which it might pass unnoticed. It is heading toward the places where satisfaction, success and pleasurable addictions and consumption are no longer able to cure the unbearable disintegration of self.

The emotions of the individual are informed and stimulated by spatial relations. The way we observe space and our own situation is necessarily emotionally coded. Interiors and exteriors impact our physical selves and mediate the expression and experience of our emotions. The small amount of space occupied by our bodies is a very special place – the nest, the womb, the shelter, the chapel, the prison. You won’t feel the thing will reveal our ability both to embody and emotionalise this space.

In the labyrinth of forking paths that is the Kunsthaus Dresden building itself, amplified by the spatial, astonishing and unpredictable works and objects, the spectator will discover numerous video works presenting an individual engaged in repetitive activities or private rituals. All the works will show the individual in heightened borderline states – in extreme situations of cold, pleasure, loneliness or pain. These works create a kind of subjective time that has nothing to do with linearity or story-telling. Looped or warped, the works suspend time, creating an individualised, unbalanced space in which extremes of emotion are anaesthetised through repetition. By tracking the ritual containment of emotional extremes in art today, this exhibition hopes to provoke a similar irrational, cathartic experience in the viewer and, thereby, both to reveal and to examine those strategies of containment that are available to us today.

Artists:
Pawel Althamer, Bogna Burska, Ursula Doebereiner, Lili Dujourie, Angelika Fojtuch, Steffen Geisler, Lise Harlev, Ellen Harvey, Hiwa K., Agnieszka Kalinowska, Grzegorz Klaman, Piotr Kopik, Jill Mercedes, Sebastian Meschenmoser, Dominika Skutnik, Pawel Kruk, Dominik Lejman, Yvette Mattern, Ivan Moudov, Anne Olofsson, Dominik Pabis, Susanne Weirich, Monika Weiss, Artur Zmijewski

The exhibition is produced by Kunsthaus Dresden, Wyspa Institute of Art and Adam Mickiewicz Institute and is co-financed by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Poland within the framework of the Polish-German Year 2005/2006.

Special thanks to: Marek Frankowski, Hanna Gawrychowska, Zenon Grudzień, Wojciech Helman, Hanna Kaniasta, Dorota Keller, Andrzej Kwiatkowski, Phyllis Larssen, Marlene Laube, Maja Linke, Janusz Lipiński, Christiane Mennicke, Magda Pustoła, Piotr Ruszkowski, Dorota Sadowska, Dominika Skutnik, Piotr Tymiński.

Project assistants in Gdansk: Maks Bochenek, Aleksandra Grzonkowska, Roma Piotrowska, Zuzanna Malicka.

Concept and coordinating of conferency: Piotr Kozak i Marek Pokropski