Opening: Friday July 11th, 8pm
Exhibition: July 12 until August 17
Location: TENT, Witte de WIthstraat 50 3012 BR Rotterdam
Featuring: Liz Allan, Maarten Bel, Sabrina Chou, Philip Ewe, Christian Hansen, Ann Maria Healy, Roos Wijma, Hannah James, Graham Kelly, Perri MacKenzie, Machteld Rullens, and Micha Zweifel.
Curated by Matteo Lucchetti
Kairos Time features twelve international artists based in Rotterdam whose works deploy a multiplicity of poetics and reflect diverse approaches to artistic practice today. The title refers to a possible common ground between the artists and the works, which may or may not be located in the spatio-temporal, social and political contexts from which they have emerged. Along with Kronos, Kairos is an ancient Greek word for time, but while the former refers to chronological, sequential time, the latter alludes to the right or opportune moment when action must be taken, chances seized or conversely lost, inevitably affecting the course of things. Kairos represents a time lapse, an indeterminate moment when anything can happen and opportunities can be grasped, if and when they are perceived at all. Kairos Time is here understood as a space of potential, found in the daily situations or circumstances that an artist must assess and work with or against.
If we view an art practice as a series of seized favorable moments, it is worth asking: how much opportunism does it take to be an artist today? In A Grammar of the Multitude (2004), the Italian philosopher Paolo Virno analyzes post-Fordist conditions of labor and describes opportunists as “those who confront a flow of ever-interchangeable possibilities, making themselves available to the greater number of these, yielding to the nearest one, and then quickly swerving from one to another.” By depriving the term of its negative connotation Virno invents an extremely up to date rhetoric around the contemporary worker, which recalls the traits of openness, flexibility, and the unbiased attitude that are often associated with the figure of the artist.
Ranging from video to installation the works in Kairos time reflect the artist’s specific capacities to transform circumstances into meaningful visual systems, to turn specific material limits and restrictions into open-ended speculative journeys, and suggest that the opportune moment is a condition of the mind rather than a logically determined and immediately graspable point in time.
In collaboration with the Master of Fine Art Program of the Piet Zwart Institute, the post-graduate studies & research institute of the Willem de Kooning Academy.
Events:
Screening Thursday July 10, 8pm
The Fertile Nexus is a presentation of video works selected by Graham Kelly in dialogue with his work in the exhibition, Kairos Time, at Tent in Rotterdam. The screening will investigate the mutation of a now fluid moving image, following its migration from a controlled cinema context to its embedment within the external environment. It sets out to question the hybridisation of both the viewer and the image in their newly shared habitat: a transitional state from which one can look into the other and the other back into one.
WORM
Boomgaardsstraat 71
3012 XA Rotterdam
The Netherlands
Weekly:
Events in Café Bel by Maarten Bel
Check TENT website: www.tentrotterdam.nl
for more info http://kairostimes.tumblr.com/
For more info check:
http://pzwart.wdka.nl/nl/courses/mfa/
or email fineart@pzi.wdka.nl