This summer at the Maumaus exhibition in Lisbon’s Galeria Avenida da India, inside a black box projector played back the live feed of SKY news. On at the time I walked-in was this video, at 0:14.
Editor’s note.
Under the title of untranslatable Swedish — Hyggelig (see also Gezellig in Dutch or Gemütlich in German), –Issue 3 address production of comfort and comfortable environments through images and rhetoric. The issue is an opportunity to check our own comfort level, too.
In the densely packed exhibition Love and Ethnology at HKW running under a bi-line “The Colonial Dialectic of Sensitivity”, across two channels Lili Reynaud-Dewar reenacts, with multiple actors, on a loop, Pasolini’s last interview and the day of his death. The interview rings familiar in its frustration with the status quo of mass-culture. Pasolini waxes nostalgic for “the poor and genuine people who fought to abolish the master without turning into him”. Though the figure of the noble revolutionary he describes had never existed, the desire for betterment, is ongoing and multiple. What betterment and comfort means, should be, but isn’t always negotiable.
A friend relayed recently that she felt “bored with herself” after being invited to speak and present her work. Slides were shown, she spoke of things in a tangible way, I got a feeling she, as I have, felt trapped inside both the teleological requirements of the art world as an intertwined system, and by self-imposed ideas of what a “professional presentation” means. As algorithms continue to shape perception, the less dimensions one’s work or person has to offer, the better one will fare, professionally. I am told in an artist press release, at least in the US, the first paragraph is for Time Out, and the third is for Frieze.
“In order to function, — Pasolini insisists via Reynaud-Dewar video, – refusal must be total and not partial, absolute, and not directed at any specific point, absurd, not dictated by wisdom.”
Happy Holidays and very best in the New Year ahead!
Anastasia Kolas, December 2019, www