ART CITIES:Barcelona-In the Open or in Stealth

A realignment of resources, technologies, and energies is taking place in the world right now. The intimation of this emergent ensemble, however, is faint and tangled. The exhibition “In the Open or in Stealth” is a fabricatory tracing indeterminate spaces and moving between tenses, all of which murmur at each other like distant lovers. We eavesdrop on this chatter.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: MACBA Archive

The exhibition “In the Open or in Stealth” at MACBA in Barcelona is a multi-layered site of discovery that explores the concept of a future in which multiple histories and geographies are placed in dialogue, giving way to a plurality of possibilities and queries by following paths that interlace, entwine and expose relations between objects, feelings and concepts, while simultaneously tracing indeterminate spaces between them.An extension of the exhibition will be the program “21 Personae” directed by Raqs Media Collective which will explore the urban fabric of our society through real-life stories of Barcelona’s diverse inhabitants. The project puts the Museum in dialogue with the city, resulting in a collection of urban chronicles. The distant future can seem more familiar than the deep present. We know it will come, regardless of whether or not we are around to witness it. In the Open or in Stealth: A realignment of resources, technologies and energies is taking place in the world right now. The intimation of this emergent ensemble, however, is faint and tangled. These trends, these new realities, are difficult to describe in the familiar languages of concert and conflict, affinity and antagonism, individuality and collectivity. Can tomorrow’s blur be a provisionally high-resolution image for here, for now? Intermittent rebellions, sometimes accompanied by cybernetic suicide or sometimes by rogue algorithm raves, rise in tandem with attempts to exorcise the ghosts that haunt the machinery of capital. This is both commonplace, and it is the news. Different tenses, the present continuous and the future imperfect, are murmuring at each other like long-distance lovers at two ends of a jagged chat line. In Room 2A, every falling wall brings with it the rise of dust. An arc of five centuries keeps a frog afloat—spinning and swirling, periodic spasms in its hind legs. Sighted in a painting by the Atelier of Hieronymus Bosch in 1516, and over two centuries later in etchings by Luigi Galvani from his electromagnetic experiments on those same hind legs, this frog finds itself in the 1992 space mission Endeavour—to determine whether it could reproduce in zero gravity. The digital simulation of its captivity in space has us circling around it while it floats very still, continuing to occasionally twitch its legs. There is not a speck of dust in this simulation of the space shuttle, but there is dust from faraway storms that is still far from settled. Room 2B.1: The 16th-century tanner-mystic Ravidas, freeing himself from the shackles of hierarchy, invites everyone to roam the palatial halls of bliss as companions. Currents expand between an archipelago of many selves, many kinds of selves, and the cosmos. The invitation reverberates through the “paintings” with rice-glue and fabrics from worn-out jacket collars, pockets, shoe insoles and fragments of calligraphy drawn from within China’s turbulent 1960s. Such energies stitch us to the maverick engineer Sangulani Chikumbutso’s quest for a technology that will harness and produce free and collective energy for all. In Room 2B.2 an adult is a child is an adult is a child. Hard infrastructure becomes fluid organism, and contained libraries open out into forests of the infinitely strange. What humans create becomes its own mischief and mystery. This is its scale, this is its time; its potential is its reality. Engulfing, bending, enfolding, these subterranean zones shape their own ecosystems. This is an exoskeleton of the present. An appointment with the sunset creates a “virtual eternity” in Room 2c.1. Two hurricanes open their eyes from the South China Sea to the East Australian Coast, from the Northern Hemisphere to the Southern. An aerogramme drums up a flight to pierce through the obscene imbalance of forces running this earth. This volatility of living is relayed through screens. Interfaces receive encounters and allow tumultuousness to gather. Room 2C.2: This is not an ordinary love. Extraction congeals, looming large on the landscape. Like an otherworldly platonic form, perhaps a proto-machine, a copper mine in the Northern Cape of South Africa conjures a figure of thought. Organs and machines love each other, generating shock as they infiltrate one another. They fall apart and come together until it is no longer possible to discern organ from prosthesis. This exhausts and propels. A stone shatters a window. A different light enters the unease and decay of a deserted factory building. The economic tumult of the 1980s unsettled neighbourhoods across Liverpool, but it may be that the stone is yet to land. What is rejected returns in force to assert its claim. In Room 2C.3, there are no ordinary materials. The stone that once shattered a window is now a room flying into orbit. Another waits underneath the oceans, a much larger one, to receive enormous reserves of oil recently extracted from the earth. Life as it may be understood is navigating ghost chambers and ghost materials—they return, they reconfigure, they haunt. A congregation of voices pulses through a low-frequency transmission. The listener stays alert to pick up signals, for transgressive powers, once aborted, can regain potential. In Room 2C.4, the body possesses a power not visible but certainly present. The currents and crosscurrents it swims against are rarely apparent, but their outcomes and effects are barefaced. The bannister of a bank floats, smoke rises from hashish fields, the enigma of an equation is at work. These conjure realities that are simultaneously calculable and hallucinogenic. They speak of power that works with psychotropic loops and lags; it is delusional but effective, perilous and fragile. In Room 2C.5, events arouse phantom bindings. A name blacklisted, an injured nerve, a deteriorating vision, a counterplot for a bullet. They operate in stealth, making occasional appearances; they are almost spectral, but in effect barbed. Much of living lies in navigating phantom presences and working upon them. Through autodidactic persistence, a détour becomes possible. Noise and darkness refuse being maligned states in Room 2D/E.  A moving body cracks past the sound barrier, and a curtain of waves, clouds and particles traces a different outline. Noise is a reminder of collisions and their intensity. Darkness thickens the ecology of the mind. Without darkness, there are no stars to see. No alien lives, no galaxies, no premonitions of other worlds. Noise, like darkness, is the moment and its retention. Darkness connects with something out of reach in space and time but which still lies within—like love for someone far away or long gone. The program “21 Personae” includes the same number of encounters with people, places and collectives in Barcelona. Together, they will attempt to transform the meaning and intensity of our experience of the city. It is also an investigation into “ways of meetin”, ways of being and interacting in the city. The program will run between November 2018 and March 2019, with one encounter every week. Raqs Media Collective was founded in 1992 by: Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. Artists curators, researchers, editors and philosophical agents provocateurs, the Collective’s work addresses connectedness, temporality and plenitude, and places them at the intersection of art, historical enquiry and philosophical speculation.

Participating Artists: Rosa Barba, Jeamin Cha, Mark Chung, Rohini Devasher, Marzia Farhana, Liao Fei, Ivana Franke, John Gerrard, Rupali Gupte and Prasad Shetty, Abhishek Hazra, Geumhyung Jeong, Hassan Khan, Charles Lim, Cristina Lucas, Kabelo Malatsie, Dillon Marsh, Huma Mulji, Mehreen Murtaza, Joe Nishizawa, Nontsikelelo Mutiti, Bahar Noorizadeh, Lucy Parker, Bhagwati Prasad, Racter, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Muhannad Shono, Lantian Xie, and Tito Zungu; as well the intervention by the Raqs Media Collective

Info: “In the Open or in Stealth”: Curators: Raqs Media Collective, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Plaça dels Àngels 1, Barcelona, Duration: 31/10/18-17/3/19, Days & Hours: Mon & Wed-Fri 11:00-19:30, Sat 10:00-20:00, Sun 10:00-15:00, “21 Personae”: Curators: Raqs Media Collective, Curatorial Collegiate: Sabih Ahmed and Hiuwai Chu, Places: Various venues (full list), Duration: 6/11/18-27/3/19, www.macba.cat