Graphic from the exhibition 'Europa: Antike Zukunft' at HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark
Image by Anastasiia Kutsova
THE EUROPEAN DREAM
A collaboratively written script and performance produced within the IZK MA seminar: Through the Looking Glass, the Realities We Found There, led by Rose-Anne Gush
June 2, 18:00
HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark
Arzu Alioğlu, Nicole Antunovic, Gagandeep Bhatti, Rose-Anne Gush, Elsa Karvanen, Budour Khalil, Alena Viola Köstl, Anastasiia Kutsova, Abdelrahman Elbashir, Farnoosh Namaziyan, Sali Ren, Ana Patrícia Silva Varão Moreira
With help from Christina Chalmers and Federico Campagna
While the postmodern turn was proclaimed with the end of the 1980s and the view spread that values such as ambiguity, polyphony and difference were about to become social guiding principles, the situation now seems to have changed dramatically. For some time now, a revival of major ideological narratives has been observable, finally being evident in the election of Donald Trump and the rise of right-wing nationalist parties. Considering the old social inequalities arising in new forms and the accompanying political developments, a critical examination of social ideologies seems urgently needed.
The European Dream is a collaboratively written script and performance developed by Rose-Anne Gush and her students at the Institute of Contemporary Art at TU Graz. The performance is meant to be an artistic tool to explore the question of the ideological forces that decisively shape our Europe today. But what does that even mean, “our Europe?” What kind of society do we live in and how can the different positions of speakers even be thought together? Ideology exists in many forms and contains beliefs, images and values that can never be considered as final and naturally given, but tend to be presented as universal, though. The performance explores different forms of mediatization of ideology and deals with strategies of representation, inversion and projection. The strategies of artistic expression will interact with the architecture of the building, which has classicist echoes coming from late modernism and has been ironically emphasized in some places for the exhibition Europe: Ancient Future. Among other things, the exhibition will reflect on how architecture produces an apparently naturalized system of values and beliefs, which has repeatedly been undermined in the course of architectural history (postmodernism, Living in Las Vegas).
