“Revolution I Love You”
“Revolution I Love You” is part of a series of events taking place in Thessaloniki and Athens (among them a film festival and an interdisciplinary conference) that explore the revolutionary year 1968 and its legacy. Curated by Maja and Reuben Fowkes, the exhibition aims to bring together works that illustrate both the global dimension of the student movement and recent acts of resistance pertinent to local social and political struggles against globalization.
Zofia Kulik and Przemysław Kwiek’s Shades of Red, 1971, one of the show’s few works actually made around 1968, consists of several hundred slides of artists’ actions involving some red element. Also playing with semiotics, Tamás Kaszás’s The Fist Collection, 2007, produced in collaboration with the RugaNegra group, is an archive of images in which fists act as politically charged symbols. Displayed in a templelike structure made from cheap materials like MDF and metal barrels, the collection hints at the working-class iconography of different resistance movements, in contrast to the elaborate visual culture of capitalism. Miklós Erhardt’s Society of the Spectacle, 2004–2007, is a textual installation consisting of printed pages, mounted on the venue’s walls, that bear the artist’s own Hungarian translation of Debord’s influential book.
Depicting for viewers the use of new technologies as an apparatus of state propaganda, Stefanos Tsivopoulos’s video Untitled (The Remake), 2007, follows the early days of Greek television, realized under the gaze of the 1967 colonels’ junta, and traces the disparities between reality and news documentation of that reality. In the next room, Csaba Nemes’s animated video Remake, 2007, looks into the riots of September 2006, when protesters seized the headquarters of Hungary’s state television network. Nancy Davenport also works in new media and here exhibits two screen savers, MayDay and What Do We Want? (both 2001); for her, the protest begins when people stop working—when, on a computer, the screen saver appears.
“Revolution I Love You: 1968 in Art, Politics, and Philosophy” travels to the Trafó House of Contemporary Arts, Budapest, Sept. 12–Oct. 19, and the International Project Space, Birmingham, UK, Nov. 13–Dec. 19.
