Aufstand der Zeichen

The discussion retraces five works that address the space both outside and inside institutions. These works form a series of subtractive detours exploring backdrops for media spectacles, inaccessible military bases, desolated spaces of popular uprisings, make-do educational settings, mutable underground storage, material residues of cold-war paranoia, and first-hand experiences of hot-war in Ukraine.

Each work performs its own subtractive operation in a form of intervention into the real, mental, hybrid, or negative spaces to identify, target and recast the existing intersections of the lines of forces. Geo- and chronolocation procedures are applied post factum to map these heterogeneous spaces into a set of A4 evidence forms derived from forensic protocols and ISO standards.

The starting point of this exploration is Sean Snyder’s video Analepsis and the ending point is his most recent work, a video-essay Time and again made in collaboration with Olga Bryukhovetska. The other works discussed are: Gate 2 Street (Okinawa), Cloud Sediment (Gstaad), and AWA deposit of ‘Exhibition’. 

CV:

Olga Bryukhovetska, PhD, Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (Ukraine), where she teaches courses on film theory and visual culture. As a researcher in visual culture she participated in numerous projects such as Memory at War: Cultural Dynamics in Poland, Russia and Ukraine (2008-2012), Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe (2010), Former West: Art and the Contemporary After 1989 (2008 – 2016). Her research focuses on political dimensions of visuality. She publishes in Ukrainian and English, her English language texts appeared in Art-It, Red Thread, KinoKultura, Apparatus: Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe, Frieze, and L' Internationale. She is currently at-risk researcher at Ruhr University Bochum (Germany). Her most recent text addresses the war in Ukraine: ‘Time and Again’ https://www.internationaleonline.org/opinions/1091_time_and_again

Sean Snyder
Aspect Ratio / Dispositif, Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, France, 2016; Aurora Borealis, Galerie Neu, Berlin, Germany, 2017; Room 11 (Latitude: 78.223, Longitude: 15.646), Longyearbyen Folkebibliotek / Kunsthall Svalbard, Norway 2021; Exhibit: NNKM.DEP.0199, Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum, Tromsø, Norway, 2022; Room 11 (Virtually Real), Guttormsgaards Arkiv, Blaker, Norway, 2022; Faithless Pictures, Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo, Norway, 2018; Always Contemporary, Ludwig Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest, Hungary, 2019; Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011, MoMA PS1, New York, NY, US, 2019