"Pan-demonium" Exhibition

AC Institute

poster for "Pan-demonium" Exhibition

This event has ended.

Pan-demonium resonates with the current global political, ecological and economic situation—one in which the hegemonic forces of order have been overwhelmed by a dynamic of chaos and disorder, turning the world 'upside-down'. Maybe Pan-demonium offers a metaphor for a critique of global capitalism and its 'devils'—its pan-demons—in all their guises (pan-demics included?). Or perhaps it conjures up collective creative forces for political challenge and the re-inscription of Pan in contemporary mythology?

AC Guest Curator, Bricolagekitchen, invited visual, sonic and written responses to some of these ideas and questions. Bricolage has various histories and contexts—from Claude Levi-Strauss on anthropology to Steven Connor on postmodern culture. John Cage’s explorations of indeterminacy and the polarities of randomness/order have an obvious relevance here. Michel Serres’ ideas on noise, clamour and cacophony and Michel de Certeau’s leaky ‘sieve order’ also lurk behind the concept of the project. Serres writes about ‘fuzzy logic’, but ‘mess’ is increasingly being cited as a new paradigm in research methodology and is being transposed to other disciplines and creative practices.

Through an exploration of the multiple meanings, interpretations and understandings of Pan-demonium, this exhibition hopes to open up political as well as its aesthetic potentialities. It brings together an assembled cacophony of over 50 contemporary artistic responses and global voices gleaned via the web in a panorama of sound, text, visual and moving imagery, celebrating the affective power of disorder and noise. Pan-demonium explores the ideas of randomness and mess through the adoption of bricolage in a makeshift bricologue of interactive presentation and responses.

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