An opera of labour and revolution
Balaskas, Bill (2014) An opera of labour and revolution. [Exhibition/show]
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The group exhibition 'An Opera of Labour and Revolution' takes an unsentimental look at the collective and its expressions both today and in the past, juxtaposing artworks based on the iconography of heroic, revolutionary gestures or collaborative, unified action. The artists selected for this exhibition are Bill Balaskas, Paolo Cirio, Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen, Felix Gmelin and Taus Makhacheva. The exhibition reminds of the need for alteration and redesign of the socio-economic realities that surround us. Proposing collective action as a cornerstone of change, it provokingly questions the individual, "who considers himself the legitimate basis of truth by virtue of what is supposed to be immediately given for him, obeys the web of delusion of a society that falsely but necessarily thinks of itself as individualistic [1]."
At the same time, the presented artworks also address the manifold risks of the collective such as loss of origin and identity, of self-determination and personal freedom. Creating an ambiguous balance between utopia and dystopia, the artworks each speak for themselves through their strong performative quality.
[1] Theodor W. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 63.
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