Abducting Europa

Event

Exhibition

Abducting Europa

An exhibition about the power of myths and stories in politically troubled Europe

8 August 2020
— 11 October 2020

12:00 — 17:00

Location: IMPAKT Centre for Media Culture

4,- euro (3,- with discount).

We are happy to announce that, because of changes in our program, we are able to extend the Abducting Europa Exhibition until 11 October

Due to the new recommendations to prevent the spread of COVID-19, we allow a maximum of 10 visitors into the exhibition. We kindly ask you for your understanding in case you have to wait to enter.

Beneath the slick surfaces of social media platforms, political debates rage in the endless comment sections where agony rules. From within these carnivalesque echo-chambers it appears as though the political consensus of the twentieth century is collapsing. Emerging from the wreckage are expressions of political collectivity that many considered relegated to the dustbin of history.

Affording ever more radical expressions of tribal identity, social media platforms are now feeding the raw material of youth culture directly into the nationalist populist insurgency that is currently sweeping across the planet. Like advertising executives and pop singers the authoritarian figures that influence these movements recognize the vital power in the cliché that “the children are our future”—as did the Fascisti a century earlier.

Appealing to the same esoteric lore that also haunts contemporary fantasy entertainment, many of these movements traffic in mythical tales of national rebirth and “rooted” national identity. Evoking the fear of an existential enemy at the gates of Fortress Europe—or more often an enemy within—this new political style is particularly successful on the terrain of online culture war.

The artists collected in this exhibition establish a coordinate system of autonomous realities in which intersectional forms of collective identity provide an alternative to essentialism, suggesting the power of storytelling as a means for positive and inclusive change rather than a return to a fictional past.

The exhibition is curated by Marc Tuters, Inez de Coo and Arjon Dunnewind. With Clusterduck, Simon Denny, Andy King, Szabolcs KissPál, Annika Larsson, Sulaïman Majali, Dorine van Meel, Liliana Piskorska and Jonas Staal.
Marc Tuters’ involvement has been partially supported by ODYCCEUS, a Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 732942.

The exhibition Abducting Europa is part of “The Grand Narrative”

IMPAKT organizes a series of special guided tours by two of the curators of the exhibition Abducting Europa on Saturday 12, 19 and 26 September.

12 September, 15:00h: Marc Tuters
Marc Tuters teaches Media & Culture at the University of Amsterdam. His research concerns radical political subcultures online. In his tour he will focus on the theories and myths that inspired the exhibition.

19 September, 15:00h: Arjon Dunnewind
Arjon Dunnewind is the artistic director and founder of IMPAKT Centre for Media Culture. For this tours Arjon invites politician Jelmer Schreuder, member of the municipal council for D66 Utrecht, to talk about the themes of the exhibition.

26 September, 15:00h: Arjon Dunnewind
Arjon Dunnewind is the artistic director and founder of IMPAKT Centre for Media Culture. For this tours Arjon invites politician André van Schie, VVD party chairman and member of the council of Province of Utrecht, to talk about the themes of the exhibition.

3 October, 15:00h: Arjon Dunnewind
Arjon Dunnewind is the artistic director and founder of IMPAKT Centre for Media Culture.

10 October, 15:ooh: TBA

Tickets Abducting Europa

UN_COUNTRYBALLS vs. THE NATION STATE

Clusterduck

New Unions – Map, draft III

Jonas Staal

Red-Faced Monkey

Liliana Piskorska

Beyond the Nation State I Want to Dream

Dorine van Meel

cyphers in the dream

Sulaïman Majali

Europe

Annika Larsson

From Fake Mountains to Faith (Hungarian Trilogy)

Szabolcs KissPál

Dear God I Just Want to Feel

Andy King

Ascent – Above the Nation State Rules

Simon Denny

Clusterduck Annika Larsson Liliana Piskorska Andy King Simon Denny Jonas Staal Szabolcs KissPál Dorine van Meel Sulaïman Majali

Clusterduck

― Artist

Clusterduck is an interdisciplinary collective working at the crossroads of research, visual communication and transmedia, focusing on the processes and actors behind the creation of Internet-related content. It curated the online exhibition #MEMEPROPAGANDA, hosted by Greencube Gallery, which was presented at The Influencers Festival (Barcelona), Tentacular Festival (Madrid), IFFR (Rotterdam), Urgent Publishing (Amsterdam, Arnheim), Radical Networks (Berlin) and others. Clusterduck is currently developing Meme Manifesto, a physical collection of printed memes and a web-based collective project aiming to show how deep the web can go. The first stage of the project will be developed at IMPAKT (NL) during the EMAP / EMARE residency programme. Clusterduck is creating the new participative exhibition format #MEMERSFORFUTURE, investigating the role of memetics in the global climate justice movement. The exhibition will be shown IRL at re:publica 2020, and to other locations around the globe. Clusterduck is also developing three different formats of collective research workshops: #HYPECOMPASS, #EscapeTheFunnel and #SOMECOMPASS. These were presented at “Sharing/Learning - Methods of the Collective” at UdK Berlin; The Influencers Festival, Barcelona; and Simposio 2019, Borca di Cadore. The group also curated online/offline exhibitions and interventions like the Wrong Digital Biennale pavilion "Internet Fame" at panke.gallery, "Make URL self at Home" at Arebyte On Screen and "Pack Your Stuff" at Offsite Project.

Annika Larsson

― Artist

In her films and videos, Annika Larsson explores relationships of power between subjects that allude to greater social themes such as economics and gender. Using a filmmaking style that favors close-ups, Larsson creates elliptical non-narrative documents of simple acts and gestures. The artist builds her themes subtly, hinting at interpersonal power dynamics without dictating her position, often featuring animals and men in business suits. “The hypnotic beauty of Ms. Larsson’s images never falters, and their ambiguities never resolve,” writes art critic Roberta Smith. “This may be how she manages to make both the allure and ugliness of power unambiguously clear.”

Liliana Piskorska

― Artist

Visual artist, born in 1988, based in Wroclaw/Poland. In 2017 she finished her PhD at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Torun. She has taken part in over 90 individual and group exhibitions in Poland and abroad. She is finalist of Forecast Forum in Haus der Kulturen der Welt/Berlin in 2017 and Audience Award Winner: Views 2019: Deutsche Bank Award. In her artistic work, she analyses social issues from the perspective of radical sensitivity, rooted in the feminist-queer and feminist-posthumanist practice and theory. She focuses on dependencies between the state, the nation, Central European identity and the position of peripheral identities. She undertakes the subject of queer lesbianism and non-heteronormativity, considering their construction and potentiality and examines the place of the Other in constructing state projects. Some important elements of her practice include the questions of group identity, group memory, construction of the law, and the methods of building imagined communities.

Andy King

― Artist

Andy King (UK) is a digital media artist whose satirical, political and often ironic works focus on internet subcultures and themes of loneliness and human relationships in a digital age. She explores life as part of the first generation which experiences popular culture through the internet — bringing with it the blurring of distinctions between truth and fiction, copy and original, and private and public spaces. King often works with found images and videos, photographing and manipulating them repeatedly in a way that mimics how information is disseminated and distorted online.

Simon Denny

― Artist

Simon Denny (*1982 Auckland/New Zealand, lives in Berlin) is an artist whose work explores the cultures and values behind contemporary technologies. In recent years, Denny has looked at the exploitation of information in data-economies, using his work to visualise systems of competing political and economic visions, interrelationships of labour, capital, developments in technologies, and impacts on the biosphere. He studied at the University of Auckland (2005), and the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main (2009). Denny’s work has been exhibited recently in solo exhibitions in the K21 in Düsseldorf (2020); Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania (2019); MOCA, Cleveland (2018); OCAT, Shenzhen (2017); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2017); WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels (2016); Serpentine Galleries, London (2015); MoMA PS1, New York (2015); Portikus, Frankfurt (2014); Adam Art Gallery, Wellington (2014); MUMOK, Vienna (2013); Kunstverein Munich (2013). He represented New Zealand at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. His works are represented in institutional collections including MoMA (New York), Walker Art Centre (Minneapolis), Kunsthaus Zürich (Zürich), Sammlung zeitgenössischer Kunst der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Berlin) and Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Wellington). Denny co-founded the BPA//Berlin Program for Artists, an artist mentoring program in 2016. Since 2018, he is a professor for Time Based Media at the HFBK, Hamburg.

Jonas Staal

― Artist

Jonas Staal (1981) is an artist and founder of the artistic and political organization New World Summit (2012-ongoing) and the campaign New Unions (2016-ongoing). Staal’s work includes interventions in public space, exhibitions, theater plays, publications, and lectures, focusing on the relationship between art, democracy, and propaganda. Recent solo exhibitions include Art of the Stateless State (Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana, 2015), New World Academy (BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht and Centraal Museum, Utrecht, 2015), After Europe (State of Concept, Athens, 2016) and Museum as Parliament (with the Democratic Federation of North Syria, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 2018). His projects have been exhibited widely, among others at the Berlin Biennial (2012), the São Paulo Biennial (2014), the Oslo Architecture Triennial (2016) and the Göteborg Biennial (2017). Recent books by Staal include Nosso Lar, Brasília (Jap Sam Books, 2014), Stateless Democracy (With Dilar Dirik and Renée In der Maur, BAK, 2015), and Steve Bannon: A Propaganda Retrospective (Het Nieuwe Instituut, 2018). The artist is a regular contributor to e-flux journal and completed his PhD research Propaganda Art from the 20th to the 21st Century at the PhDArts program of the University of Leiden. Staal lives and works in Athens and Rotterdam.

Szabolcs KissPál

― Artist

Szabolcs KissPál (1967) lives in Budapest, Hungary. His main field of interest is the intersection of new media, visual arts and social issues. He is currently an associate professor at the HUFA Budapest. Works presented among others at the Venice Biennial, ISCP and Apexart New York, Stedelijk Museum, Seoul International Media Art Biennale, and other venues. Between 2012-15 he has been actively involved in various activist projects.

Dorine van Meel

― Artist

Dorine van Meel (1984, NL) is an artist based between Berlin and Amsterdam. Her practice unfolds in collaborative and discursive projects that result in moving image installations, performances and publications. Her solo work has been shown at the South London Gallery (London), the 10th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (Berlin), W139 (Amsterdam), Transmediale (Berlin), Nottingham Contemporary (Nottingham), KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin). In 2014 she became the fourth recipient of the Nina Stewart artist residency at the South London Gallery. She holds an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College (London). She teaches at the Sandberg Instituut and the Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and Bard College in Berlin.

Sulaïman Majali

― Artist

Sulaïman Majali (b. 1991, London) lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland. Majali is an artist and writer interrogating the spatio-temporal logics of the enduring colonial and subsequent incarcerations of histories and their entangled futures. Contextualised in an age of anxiety, collapse and multiplicities, the work looks through a diasporic optic towards folding and creasing as conceptual and poetic methodologies for a radical remembering, to think and speak divergence, collaterality and peripherality as political and spiritual exigencies. Exhibitions and events include: IMMUNE SYSTEMS & ANTIBODIES, Internet of Things: Another World is Possible, Darat al Funun/The Khalid Shoman fdn., Amman, Jordan/online (2020). a dream for scheherazade, EVERYTHING HAPPENED SO MUCH, the one minutes for 66th International Film Festival, Oberhausen, Germany (2020). WHAT’S AHEAD, WHAT’S KNOWN, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland (2020). saracen go home, (solo), Collective Gallery Edinburgh, Scotland 2019. Pixelated Peripheries // مساحات مبكسلة, ACC, Haifa, Palestine (2019). something vague and irrational, Celine Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland (2019). assembly of the poets, a reading as part of EARTH HOLD for Qalandiya International Biennial, Serpentine Galleries, London, England (2018). Mene Mene Tekel Parsin, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, England (2017). Towards an archive, 8th Cairo Video Festival, Cairo, Egypt (2017). this garden, this performed home that incessantly grows, V&A Museum, London. this scattering of minds; like seeds, Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna/Transmission Gallery. as if we were strangers; that strangeness was ours, CCA Glasgow. Sulaïman Majali was shortlisted for the Margaret Tait Award 2020/21 and is artist/researcher in residence at Talbot Rice Gallery/Edinburgh College of Art until December 2020, Majali’s upcoming solo show false dawn will be presented as part of the postponed Glasgow International Festival of Visual Arts in 2021.