 tranzit.orgCuratorial Team: Vít Havránek, Zbynek Baladrán, Dóra Hegyi, Boris Ondreicka, Georg SchöllhammerCuratorial assistant Anna Pahissa Deulofeu
tranzit.org is a network of autonomous art associations, existing since 2002 in Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, which cooperate working across borders - between nations, languages and histories. Each tranzit-group operates independently from each other, using different formats and methods - such as discursive platforms, exhibitions, publications and research initiatives - but always aiming to generate a deep involvement in the local artistic and intellectual context. At the same time each tranzit-group carries out a re-assessment of contemporary history, challenging the canons, geography and master-narratives of post-war European (art) histories. The aim of tranzit.org is to act trans-locally, in constant dialogue with cultural narratives on a local and global scale. C.T.D.
Constitution for Temporary DisplayIn this exhibition twenty-seven artists and two artistic groups present their subjective answers to the invitation to conceive a new artwork for Manifesta 8.
Manifesta 8 was announced under the motto. The region of Murcia in dialogue with northern Africa. This exhibition is not a direct illustration of this motto. We see "a dialogue" as a conflict of transfers of different imaginations that has a long history of changing domination and subalternity; but there have also been cultural processes and processes of social imitation, a history of multiple ex- and interchanges intertwined.
We think that an exhibition is an engaged display of artistic practices that explore the assumptions behind such political or cultural power relations and strives to get to their roots, taking up a position of conflictive thought. Therefore this exhibition is the result of a collective thinking about the possibility to create an autonomous, self-constituting space shaped by aesthetic, social and political conditions; a space where the curators and the artists open up their work to criticism, imagination, reflection and re-elaboration, also through the participation of the public. A group exhibition, that draws its force from the iconoclastic, hybrid, transgressive, resistant concept of artistic practice.
To query the conventions of the routine format of any biennial, the "group exhibition," we have written a set of forty questions "which we called" "Constitution for Temporary Display" (C.T.D.) and discussed them with the artists in a collective procedure. This process of self-constitution as well as non-constitution of a collective that met for the first time didn't have any rules. It was conceived as an empty imaginative space, where norms, methodologies and rules of the procedure or non-procedure were to be established. Many frontiers appeared. The "results" of these debates on the C.T.D. are the foundations of this exhibition. Some of them we failed to realize, some are invisible in the exhibition and some were materialized.
Based on the practical aspects of knowledge, such a process combining subjective/collective imagination with scientific, poetic and political matters has to be constantly re-evaluated. We hope that our formulation of the C.T.D. establishes a space in between polarities, a space for action and non-action, an open space where you are invited to contribute.
http://www.tranzit.org
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