FILIP MARKIEWICZ & EDMOND OLIVEIRA  

EXPOSED FOR DESTRUCTION

May 8 - June 30, 2007

‘The last thing I would promise to do would be to improve the human kind’ (Nietzsche)

Progress and humanity were and are equated with reason as understood by the Enlightenment. The belief in reason is tantamount to the belief that a better world is possible. A chimera, as is patent nowadays for the umpteenth time. Indeed, we continuously experience how human reason destroys precisely that humanity that once made it possible. Thus, the controversial theses of Horkheimer and Adorno stating that, in the emancipatory process of modern times, reason is invariably bound up with a rationally determined purpose (and, hence, that it is invariably mutilated) seems to be confirmed by the facts.

Terror and force, freedom and justice — human reason seems to combine everything.

With this, the subject matter of the exhibition is mentioned: it revolves around the emancipation of reason and its power of destruction, but it also speaks about how to avoid this destructive power: art as a symbolic action of unfulfilled radicalism. Exposed for Destruction is a zone of freedom, a place of authenticity in the midst of rationalisation and isolation. The works on display are neither symptoms of a so-called ‘hedgehog esthetics’, nor just showing offs, but they are ‘destructive happenings’.

The artists Edmond Oliveira and Filip Markiewicz thus follow the paths of the artistic militia of the avant-garde. But their goal is not a specific political accusation, or any kind of moral indignation: they deal with the involvement of art and power, of art and society, and of the relationship between art and aesthetics.

René Kockelkorn