Art under Conditions of Political Repression 60s-80s / South America / Europe

Subversive Practices devotes itself to experimental and conceptual art practices that had become established between the nineteen-sixties and eighties in Europe and South America under the influence of military dictatorships and communist regimes. The exhibition, comprising more around eighty artistic positions, has been developed by a team of thirteen international curators in close collaboration with the Kunstverein over a two-year process.

The exhibition's nine sections will be focused on various contexts and strategies of artistic production along with their positioning vis-à-vis political and cultural repression in the GDR, Hungary, Romania, the Soviet Union, Spain, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, and Peru. Of equal concern here are both the particularities of and the relations between the different temporal and local environments.

The exhibition undertakes the experiment of a shifted cartograph and an extended understanding of conceptual art, which has become established well beyond the Anglo-American canon. In this respect, the related interdisciplinary, collaborative, and sociopolitical potentials are particularly emphasized-that is, the paradigm shifts between visual arts, politics, society, academia, architecture, design, mass media, literature, dance, theater, activism, and so forth, which have been educed by these potentials.

Furthermore, the focus is on artistic practices that not only radically question the conventional concept of art, the institutions, and the relationship between art and public, but that have, at the same time, subversively thwarted structures of censorship and opposed the existing systems of power. Here, body, language, and public space represent the pivotal instruments, of resistance, symbolic and performative in equal measure. The appropriation of media and distribution channels-especially the postal service-has in turn played a distinctive role in the establishment of the widely ramified networks between (Eastern) Europe and Latin America.

Further information:
http://www.wkv-stuttgart.de/en/programme/2009/exhibitions/subversive/
http://subversive.c3.hu/en/index.php