ART-PRESENTATION: Lucky
Neoliberalism is generally held to be an economic doctrine that understands human freedom to be best achieved through free markets and entrepreneurial enterprise, privileging the individual above all else. In some countries, the governments accepted the crisis as yet another manifestation of “creative destruction,” as an incentive to seek new approaches and capture new opportunities.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: nGbK Archive
With a focus on queer and feminist practices, the project “Lucky” at neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK) in Berlin is composed of an exhibition, performances, panels, and workshops and questions the role of luck as a cultural myth that explains and normalizes privilege. As the curatorial team states “Everything in life is luck, or so we’ve heard. If you work hard, you will succeed—you just need to wait for your big break and play your cards right. Success once realized is often passed off as lucky coincidence. But what if you can’t even get a seat at the casino table?” The project challenges the mythology of luck and trace the ways it obscures and rearranges privilege. Labor, as an expression of will, is seemingly all one needs to succeed: hard work will lead to success, but success once realized is sometimes passed off as lucky coincidence. These old narratives actively render historical and structural oppression invisible in physical, digital, and spiritual spaces. In the performance “How to Greet Like a Jamaican: Step 2,” that Zwoisy Mears-Clarke will present on July 29, the artist invites an audience member to take part in a feast he has prepared of traditional Jamaican cuisine from his motherland. Lucky is the guest invited by the host to taste a culinary practice passed down through a colonial history of violence–laying bare on the table the ambivalent nature of hospitality and service. Playing with the luck of talent and the fortune of “good timing,” the installation “Biji Diva!” depicts artist Ming Wong performing as alter ego, Bülent Wongsoy, inspired by Bülent Ersoy, the famous real-life Turkish singer. With a deliberate disregard for authentic adaptation, Wong—a Singaporean man in drag inspired by a transwoman—maintains the status of diva like the original muse Ersoy, but does so defiantly, claiming that Wongsoy, can “turn tear gas into hair spray”. Embracing the idea that technology acts as a mirror of the organic world, capable of healing or poisoning depending on its usage and users, Tabita Rezaire’s “PREMIUM CONNECT”, that explores the origins of information and communication technologies (ICTs), drawing on wisdoms from the fungi underworld, ancestors communication, numerology, African divination systems, sacred geometry, Dogon astrology, and the earth’s energetic grid among other spiritual technologies. The history of colonial domination and the erasure of indigenous knowledge systems are closely related to the history of our ‘modern’ technologies. PREMIUM CONNECT digs into ancient cosmologies in search of technological authenticity, which do not rely on exploitation, exclusion, empiric rationality and profit. This study of dynamic networks from artificial and biologic environments digs into the politics of possibilities, where a mystico-techno-consciousness could nurture a mind-body-spirit-technology symbiosis. GeoVanna Gonzalez’s sculptures “Forever Ride or Die” are cement casts of car tires in various states of decay. Both real-world objects and symbolic icons, these sculptures play with new and pristine representations of a technology almost as old as time. Speaking of movement and different notions of (social) mobility, Gonzalez evokes the medieval idea of “Rota Fortunae,” the wheel of the goddess Fortuna. With each spin, the goddess can send a peasant into the robes of a queen, or a Kreuzberg google campus executive from the office to the curb.Also a Performance Festival Weekend is held on 27–29/7/18, with Ok-Hee Jeong, Roni Katz, Zwoisy Mears-Clarke, Nasheeka Nedsreal, Xenia Taniko, Melanie Jame Wolf
Participating Artists: Travis Alabanza, Nicola Awang, Zinzi Buchanan & Trev Flash, GeoVanna Gonzalez, Natalie Igor Dobkin, Ok-Hee Jeong, Laura G. Jones, Angela Kaisers, Roni Katz, Alexander Linton, Anarel·la Martínez-Madrid, Zwoisy Mears-Clarke, Nasheeka Nedsreal, Ileana Pascalau, Plural Authorship Collective, Tabita Rezaire, Anaïs Senli, Coral Short, Eve Tagny, Xenia Taniko, Anna Uddenberg, Vagittarius Rising, Cathy Walsh, Giegold & Weiß, Kandis Williams, Melanie Jame Wolf, Ming Wong, Miriam Yammad, Inga Zimprich (Feministische Gesundheitsrecherchegruppe)
Info: neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK), Oranienstraße 25, Berlin, Duration 7/7-2/9/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Tue & Thu-Sun 12:00-19:00, Wed: 12:00-20:00, https://ngbk.de
