Adrian Paci
Temporary Shelter Centre, 2007
Videoproiezione 16:9, 5’30”, col.
Courtesy Galleria Francesca Kauffmann, Milano

from exhibition Eurasia. Geographic cross-overs in art
28th June to 16 November 2008

MartRovereto
Corso Bettini, 43
38068 Rovereto (TN)
http://www.mart.trento.it

I found this image to be completely riveting and amazing—-wanted to share with you guys—-it is exactly the poise of people without state, on the thresholds of identity and politics by way of a staircase (“moving up in the world”) that itself is mobile… who knows where we’re going?

Some ideas from the press release of this exhibition that I found relevant for us to think about:

The exhibition will present a vision of art able to “pierce” every separate identity and indicate the possibilities of an art full of interchanges between Europe and Asia; in other words, “Eurasia”.

The title of the exhibition is borrowed from the name given by Beuys to a series of performances executed between 1966 and 1968, represented in the exhibition by the video of Eurasienstab, 1967, realised on 9th February 1968 at the Wide White Space in Antwerp.

According to Beuys, Eurasia is a geographic vision and, at the same time, an expression of a new, complex artistic identity that is no longer territorial and self-sufficient, but aimed at the world and man.

In 1967, with a Manifesto, the German artist founded the fictitious state of Eurasia. This was an open territory without physical or dogmatic borders: the geographic representation of a utopia, a fusion of Western realism and Oriental mysticism, the venue for a totality as yet not dispersed.

Total art, a new humanism and ethical responsibility are the key words for a project that appears surprising if reconsidered from its inception in the 1960s to the present day, from Beuys to the
latest generation.

Some fundamental aspects of Beuys’ work – multiculturalism and the aspiration towards a total art, his stance regarding going beyond borders, and the “amplified concept of art” – find a timely echo in the work of artists of the young generation.

We talked about the “total work” of Gao Xingjian, but, how is it in German, the “gesamtkunstwerk” has existed for a long time. Beuys was working very much with performance, and while i would not like to reduce the asia part of eurasia to the “mysticism” that Beuys was looking at, I think that this question of a deterritorialised identity is an important one for our work. I don’t mean to say that we can be anything we would like to be in terms of identity politics, but our ways of maneuvering identity in the huaren context is something that we could possibly share. I like very much the idea of maneuvering identities as a way of looking at utopias, where we find the thresholds between who we are and who we would like to be.