MOVING FORWARD TO THE END
Our grandest collective fetish resides in our institutions, where we endlessly expend our energy to reform, reconfigure and convolute their governance upon us. We seek solace in dressing up their edifices, both architectural and ideological, seduced into their diabolically ornate systems. They are prisms of our ideal human imago, adorned and worshipped for their immortal promise. With good faith in human progress, we soldier on in the abstraction of human life. Equipped with hi-end bureaucratic artillery, institutions are our death drive made legal.
In the visual arts, the field is similarly unwell. For a while it seemed the emergence of ʻinstitutional critiqueʼ would heal the [art] world with regulated doses of self-reflexivity. This oxymoronic revolt may still throw all manner of spanners into the works, but to no avail. Thereʼs just no helping it. The institution is too far gone.
Moving Forward to the End is an exhibition showcasing the logical progression of institutional critique – enter the ʻinstitutionally dismalʼ. The artists/collectives in this show embody and assume the redundancy of our pathological enterprises. Unlike their not too distant relatives, they are not out to fix things. In them we see no exit, they are the failed human project; the institutionalized, the hypocritical and the enemy of the state.
curated by Iakovos Amperidis
2 – 10/6/12