A Part of No-Part. Parallelisms Between Then and Now

This exhibition explores totalitarian and post-totalitarian contemporary art from Poland, Czech Republic, Croatia, and New York. The videos and installations are gathered around the idea that history can only be represented through some form of distortion, detour, or absurdity that enables a distancing from the represented reality, so that meaning can be redefined and rearticulated. Jacques Rancière queries: “Are some things unrepresentable?” and responds, “The invention of actions is both a boundary and a passage between two things: the events, at once possible and incredible, which tragedy links; and the recognizable and shareable feelings, volitions and conflicts of will that it offers the spectator.” 1 Political conflict is the tension between a dominant social structure in which each part has its place, and ‘a part of no-part,’ which stands for a human mass that destabilizes the functional order of things. 2

This exhibition explores totalitarian and post-totalitarian contemporary art from Poland, Czech Republic, Croatia, and New York. The videos and installations are gathered around the idea that history can only be represented through some form of distortion, detour, or absurdity that enables a distancing from the represented reality, so that meaning can be redefined and rearticulated. Jacques Rancière queries: “Are some things unrepresentable?” and responds, “The invention of actions is both a boundary and a passage between two things: the events, at once possible and incredible, which tragedy links; and the recognizable and shareable feelings, volitions and conflicts of will that it offers the spectator.” 1 Political conflict is the tension between a dominant social structure in which each part has its place, and ‘a part of no-part,’ which stands for a human mass that destabilizes the functional order of things. 2

The predominance of video in the show points to what Polish art critic Marek Wasilewski has noted as Poland’s technological paradox: an increasing predominance of video art, paired with a belated modernity which lacks an adequate consumer market. 3

The political effect of an aesthetic experience is only possible through the disruption between meaning and function, between the thinkable and the feasible. As Jacques Rancière reminds us, the political struggle is not the debate of expressed demands but the struggle for recognition and legitimacy, which can only happen in a space of in-between, a space that acts as the blurring and contesting between the civil society and the public space, creating ‘a part of no part’ that is both temporary and contingent.

A Part of No-Part
Parallelisms Between Then and Now
Kuratoren: Denise Carvalho, Michal Kolecek

Künstler: Hubert Czerepok, Kuba Bakowski, Norman Leto, Jozef Robakowski, Milena Dopitova, Jacek Malinowski, Slaven Tolj, Jiri Kovanda, Zdena Koleckova, Jiri Cernicky, Lukasz Gronowski, Piotr Zylinski, Pavel Mrkus, Dario Solman