all our tomorrows
: the culture of camouflage

24 November 2006 - 14 January 2007
Kunstraum der Universitaet Lueneburg, Scharnhorststrasse 1, Halle 25

The exhibition brings together a series of works by artists working in a cultural field that can be best described in terms of a ‘culture of camouflage’, which, according to Spanish theoretician, Danne Ojeda, is a particular characteristic of Latin-American art but can also be used to discuss aspects of culture as a whole: ’It is evident that a culture born out of and built around resistance to hegemonic domination would inevitably develop into a culture of camouflage. In repressing resistance, power only makes it stronger by forcing it to create more subtle and sophisticated strategies for survival‘.

The exhibition and connected activities, which include a panel discussion between the artists, Shaheen Merali and Bettina Steinbrügge, guided talks and a publication, helps to investigate circumstances of domination in regard to the practice of freedom. The works have often been articulated in conditions that artists tend to describe as being ‘extremely limited or completely impossible’ where liberation becomes less of a desire and more of a necessity. The works show experimental, liberating actions, which employ diverse materials - high art used as a strategy alongside site specificity in order to realise and enmesh power structures, histories and positions which counter histories and make resistance into sites of works.

It is in the very fact of potential translation that every act of liberation opens up new relations of power, which in turn exposes the inherent danger of domination. Liberation has to be maintained, that is, the reinstated mobility of power relations has to be controlled by what Foucault calls, ‘practices of liberty’.

http://kunstraum.uni-lueneburg.de/projekte/e-allourtomorrows.html