Raqs Media Collective, There Has Been a Change of Plan, 200

Operating from Delhi since the early 1990s, Raqs Media Collective has developed a multifaceted body of work with a unique take on globalized culture. Mixing contemporary art with historical and philosophical theory, their diverse work consists of a wide range of old and new media techniques, including image-text collages, installations, performances, and media objects.

Reflecting on the politics of mobility and dislocation, There Has Been a Change of Plan (2007) is a series of photographs of derelict airplanes. Showing removed noses, damaged wings, or other states of ruin, the work is an invitation to pause and converse about the “debris of the unrealizable.”

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Artists 4 Freedom ran an interview yesterday with artist Greg Chadwick who has been inspired by the recent protests and political situation in Iran. His most recent series, Neda, which focuses on the young Iranian woman brutally shot during protest. Inspired by the Martin Luther King quote, “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”, Chadwick wants to make sure the happenings in Iran, especially the death of the innocent young woman, are remembered. 

In the interview, Chadwick recalls watching Neda in her last moments in this world on TV, and suddenly “the distance between California and that street in Tehran was cut thin and I felt it….I knew her face needed to be remembered…as a human being with personhood, with a face of beauty and of innocence but also with cause”. 

This is yet another example of how art can communicate messages and feelings that words or other media simply cannot. Especially in times of unrest, art connects us and allows us to feel the “personhood” of others, even when they are a million miles away dealing with something that we can’t totally wrap our minds around.  Chadwick has tapped into this and used the intense set of emotions we all deal with when viewing something like this on TV. Except rather than just turning off the TV and returning to his life, he decided to do something about it, to help communicate his emotions and ideas about this crisis to others. I think because of this, you can really sense the feeling in his paintings. To view more of Chadwick’s work, click here. His blog is also available here.

Interview magazine recently ran a great dialogue between singer M.I.A and painter Kehinde Wiley, discussing both Wiley’s innovative European-inspired representations of young black men and the future of the art world as a whole. In the wake of so many stale “just add water” artists and the reality TV era where it seems everyone truly does have their fifteen minutes of fame, is it possible to create art that is actually fresh? Wiley says it is his desire to “restart the conversation…throw away the old rules. This is something that, as artists, we constantly deal with-throwing away the past, slaying the father, and creating the new.” His portraits revolutionize the way black men and black culture are perceived – drawing inspiration from classic European portraiture, he takes his subjects from the streets of New York City and keeps them as they are, in sneakers, basketball jerseys and tank tops, creating a “mash-up of museum treasure and the urban life outside of its gates.”

M.I.A also discusses her experiences before she was famous, living in Sri Lanka pre-September 11th as a recent film school graduate. She talks about the bizarre influence of money-driven American culture in third world countries, stating “when I would go to Africa I used to get really pissed off that people would listen to 50 Cent in, like, a mud hut and want DVD players…because I realized that you have to teach people in a clichéd way how to be happy in the American media. Achieving happiness is not really about having a flat stomach and the best car.” 

The conversation between these two highly influential artists is worth a read as they both have something real to say about the often difficult interaction between global and American culture and the influence of that exchange on the artists and the art community.

Niels Van Tomme writes in Foreign Policy in Focus:

Hungarian-born Ferenc Gróf and Jean-Baptiste Naudy of France established Société Réaliste (Realist Society) in 2004. Their organization has spawned 10 distinct entities, from a political consulting firm to an almanac publisher, that all mix art and politics in innovative ways.

With EU Green Card Lottery, for instance, they launched a campaign that drove potential migrants to a website to apply for an imaginary “EU Green Card” — a sharp commentary on global immigration management. Their design agency Transitioners specializes in political transitions, and questions the centrality of revolution and transition in Western society.

Balancing art, politics, design, and research, the Paris-based mavericks produce artworks, exhibitions, publications, and conferences that generate a great deal of debate. Consistently taking the side of the excluded and exploited — what the French call tiers-état (the third estate) — Société Réaliste is conquering the art establishment through its radical political agenda.

NIELS VAN TOMME: What is Société Réaliste exactly? Who are you? What do you do?

SOCIÉTÉ RÉALISTE: Société Réaliste is a cooperative, created in Paris in December 2004 by Ferenc Gróf and Jean-Baptiste Naudy. As early as June 2004, we decided to curate an exhibition dealing with the aesthetic relationship between socialist realism and social forms in contemporary art. Socialist Realism being “Réalisme Socialiste” in French, we inverted the term and coined “Société Réaliste” as the title of this curatorial project. After six months of research, we decided to convert our first critical intentions into a positive device. So we created a structure, a cooperative, which produces objects, such as artworks, exhibitions, texts, lectures, etc.

Transitioners: Le Producteur, exhibition view, Synagogue de Delme, France, 2007.

During the last four years, Société Réaliste has created 10 different enterprises, some already bankrupt, through which it designs lines of production. We are running a political trend bureau (Transitioners), an immigration agency (EU Green Card Lottery), a ministry dealing with the politics of the space (Ministère de l’Architecture), a legislative consulting firm (Cabinet Société Réaliste Conseil), a geopolitical numismatics unit (Marka), an almanac-publishing office working on a Rabelaisian utopia (Almanach de Thélème), and a museum dedicated to the study of urban signs (IGM). Three enterprises have collapsed: our public bank account structure (Over The Counter), our company designing marketing models for the field of contemporary art (Ponzi’s), and our counter-biennial (Manifesta 6.1).

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The ancient social concept of “exchange,” once central to the trade of goods and culture, has been hybridized into complex and volatile systems of speculation and accumulation which reduce humans to consumers, taxpayers, debtors and, increasingly, the unemployed.

As a first step to redress this process, Floating Lab Collective has launched Scream at the Economy, inviting anyone and everyone to call in and scream at the economy, venting desperate and instinctive expressions of survival, warnings of danger, cathartic affirmations of power, explosions of anger and despairing utterances of anxiety and hopelessness (remember Munch!).  The recorded archive of screaming will be transformed by six international composers into new symphonies for the “Screamer,” to be performed in front of relevant financial institutions.

How to participate:

1. Call 646-402-5686, extension 90514, 24-hours a day.
2. Scream at the economy (for best results, hold the phone a few inches away from your mouth).
3. Download scream music after June 25th at: Scream At The Economy.

Upcoming FLC projects will delve further into the state of the global economy by instigating new, alternative forms of community currency.

Floating Lab Collective is the community arts program of Provisons Learning Project.