[No More Reality - step 3: SHARED FOLDER]

Dear colleagues and friends,
my colleague Claire Staebler and I are glad to announce the new
release of No More Reality: Crowd and Performance project, which is
taking place at Shadow Cabinet project space, at De Appel Institute
for Contemporary Art - Amsterdam, from 4 of July to 7th of September,
2008.
No More Reality
[Crowd and Performance: demonstration, public space, use of body]
Step 3:
SHARED FOLDER

Video/audio installations: Fia Backstrom and Sharon Hayes
Video screenings: Johanna Billing, Susanne Burner, Marcelo Exposito,
Inventory, Ligna, Radek Community,
R.E.P Group, Skart Group, Hito Steyrel, Annika Strom, Dmitry Vilensky,
Henry VIII Wives (in collaboration
with Horkestar, Vladmarx, BGYSS, WoO, Milos, Jelena and Ana)

Magazines, books, newspapers, posters, leaflets: Susanne Burner, Chto
Delat, Sam Durant,
David Ter Oganyan, Roman Ondak, R.E.P Group, Bruno Serralongue, Annika Strom,
Phillipe Parreno, Version

++ No More Reality library, Video self-service, Take away corner

Project is curated by: Claire Staebler & Jelena Vesic

From the popular settings of art history we can recall two faces of the crowd:
the first, recognized as the holder of political will (demonstrations
or revolutionary masses),
appearing in many historical or allegorical paintings, and the second
one - more neutral
and more dispersed, usually connected to the representation of the
city, modernity and
urban life. Of course, the crowd is never neutral... Apparently
nameless bodies, anonymous
minds and ordinary settings are always producing narratives and images
related to the
dominant politics of public spaces. Even impressionist chronicles that
tend to be a
'disinterested' mass scenes are not only the random frames of the
street life. As records
of early modernity, they basically announce the standardization of the
city crowd, the early
control of public space and the regulation of the behaviour of the
masses in the street.

Is that the only perspective?

Standing out as an individual in the crowd becomes the most important
aspect that constitutes
identity today. It becomes a recognizable sign of successfully
realized authorship, originality
and authenticity. But, the perspective of this claim can be observed
as just another aspect of a
new "experience economy", where lifestyle industries are transforming
the individual into a
unique "commodity personality".

In the culture of the spectacle, everybody is a performer.

The transformation of cultural and political space during the 1990's
encompasses different
mechanisms of control of public space and, at the same time,
establishes propaganda of
guarantee and security. Spectacular reports of mass events and war
scenes or violent
demonstrants are turned into aestheticized images, which feed our
imagination. These
images we start to love and enjoy the same way we enjoy action movies,
horror movies
and disaster movies. They tell us that the horror is somewhere else
and that we can freely
surrender to the visual pleasure and the feeling of security.

Capitalist modernization of society and gentrification of core city
areas across the world is
taking place parallel with the entrenching and widening of political
control of public spaces.
The introduction of surveillance technologies and new regimes of
behavior are induced
through simultaneous processes of privatization of public space and
new forms of division
between the spheres of private and public.

The No More Reality [Crowd and Performance: demonstration, public
space, use of body]
examines the new possibilities of collective thinking and collective
acting in the public space.
It is a theoretical-practical platform, which gathers a group of
artists, activists, theorists,
curators, magazines and radio broadcasters, investigating performative
aspects of the crowd
in the streets and the political implications of body practices in the
public space.
The No More Reality is developing in stages starting from 2005.
Exhibitions, publications
and discussions accompanying this process are conceptualized as
fragmentary situations
and steps in the research, rather then the final projects with the
fixed and definite conclusions.

For the third step of the No More Reality project the curatorial team
is opening up their folder
of the research materials, creating the display in the form of a
small-scale documentation center.
Showing the art installations created for specific sites, together
with video and audio records,
catalogues, books, posters and leaflets, transforms the exhibition
space into the environment
in which the content can be examined and reflected rather than
passively consumed.
The selection of the artworks presented here also sheds the light on
the variety of tools used
for different manifestations like slogans, flags, t-shirts, free
newspapers and flyers, offering an
insight into the aesthetics and vocabulary of the contemporary protest.