Graz, Austria – Yael Bartana created Two minutes at midnight (2021), a video and an installation of his only channel, in response to the first Trump presidency. The 47 -minute film follows five actors playing civil servants in an entirely female government while they are thinking about real experts in areas, including journalism, international affairs, law, cultural studies and psychology. A major and anonymous world power that campaigned on a de-escalation and disarmament platform is in an existential emergency. “Twittler” has just ordered nuclear warheads to be intended for a key ally, and a decision must be taken quickly. There are only two minutes left on “the day of the day of the day to reject the” crazy “provocation strategy.
Feminist criticism highlighted in the group program Poetics of powerCurrently in sight in Kunsthaus Graz, continues with the sculpture of Anna Zvyagintseva “The Cage” (2010). The work recreates the taking of the courtroom in the autocratic countries in which the defendants are inhumanly forced to be exposed during the trial, like zoo animals. The zvyagintseva cage is however made of textiles; Without his hidden metal reinforcement, he was going to stop on himself, an appropriate metaphor for the inherent instability of the oppressive diets.
Suspended from the ceiling is “sewing on your own” (2022) by Ala Savashevich, a life -size apron in Chainmail. Usually, an emblem of female domestic work, the apron indicates here the fact that the part of the lion of all cleaning, cooking and education of children of the world is the work carried out by women who are generally not remunerated in a cycle of self-perpetuation of economic dependence on men. Here, the clothing of the housewife is transformed into an ironic symbol of autonomy and liberation which appropriates an artifact of the medieval war and feminizes it, the steering and all.
Which unites many works in Poetics of power is the silent subversiveness of their approach and their skillful deconstruction of the “dominant voice of militarized masculinity”, in the words of the learned feminist Carol Cohn, to reveal the human realities behind the history of the surface. In the video of Erkan Özgen “Wonderland” (2016), for example, a dull 13 -year -old boy named Muhammed to be physically reconstructed, through a large display of gestures and mime that borders the dance, the horrors of which he witnessed when his family was forced to flee northern Syria. We see him look through twins and pointing to the horizon, using his teeth to tear the spindle from a grenade and throw it aside. His story without words raises questions about historiography, on the stories of who are told and how. It is as if he had broken the dead angles of the spoken language to allow us, as viewers, to feel the pain viscerally, to testify to all that he saw and felt – not despite his inability to vocalize his experience, but precisely because of this.
What would the world look like today if we meet War with shame rather than glory? A political culture like the current American administration, which is largely made up of men with a history of documented sexual abuse, can adopt abuses on several levels: natural resources in the world, vulnerable countries, an increasingly precarious workforce. The works Poetics of power Imagine a society opposed to economic, ideological and cultural exploitation – in which our hero stories concern consensus manufacturers, problems of problems and craftsmen.
Poetics of power continues in Kunsthaus Graz (Lendkai 1, Graz, Austria) until May 25. The exhibition was organized by Andreja Hribernik and Nini Palavishvili.
