Studium Generale 2011-2012
We are the time
Art Lives in the Age of Global Transition
Drawing inspiration from The Role of a Lifetime (2003), a work by artist and filmmaker Deimantas Narkevičius, WE ARE THE TIME will explore the role of lifetime and life experience as a crucial source of ideas and inspirations, as a force that shapes ones’ art practice. Life experience is always generated as the intersection between the personal rhythm of one’s life and the larger societal perspective. How do we position ourselves in time? What are the decisive moments in our personal lives? What is our relation to the historical moment or context? How do we weave them into our life-narratives? The reflection on historical moments and situations together with one’s personal experience converge into a generative force that searches form in a work of art, an image, a gesture or informs one’s entire practice. The work of art becomes thinking history out loud.
From Tahrir Square to Occupy Wall Street – we are witnessing a worldwide desire for transition, but its direction is still open. This momentum belongs to the youngest generation of artists who will contribute to it with their work and shape it with the way they form fleeting communities. Can we imagine our lives and our work after twenty years?
With the advent of digital technologies and new regimes of representation, the rapid changes in our media-environment suggest very different ways of relating to the materiality of images and to their authenticity. The network condition we live in, offers unprecedented possibilities to have simultaneous and multiple perspectives on events with social and historical significance. This implies a very different mode of historicizing, of writing down our memories. It is in this vortex of eventfulness we have to find ourselves again.