NYAB Event - “The Issues of Our Time (3): Less Time, More Issues” Exhibition

“The Issues of Our Time (3): Less Time, More Issues” Exhibition

Artists Space

This event has ended.

This third edition of the project The Issues of Our Time follows two previous iterations at castillo/corrales, a co-operatively run non-profit art space in Paris. In the context of Artists Space Books & Talks, the project will involve contributions from artists, writers and curators including Valentin Boure, Thomas Boutoux, Antonia Carrara, Joachim Hamou, Egija Inzule, Morag Keil, Hans-Christian Lotz, Mélanie Matranga, Lili Reynaud Dewar, Kari Rittenbach, and Benjamin Thorel.

With the subtitle “Less Time, More Issues,” the event-based exhibition is structurally thought of as an open-ended setting: a site for circulating problems and methods, keeping the trace of social constraints and intimate behaviors.

When making things public, what makes sense is what takes time; what takes value are displacements, misunderstandings, and trafficking. Commonplaces, stories, well-worn references and emotions, are the tokens that allow us to handle the awkward and embarrassing necessity of how-to-perform-one’s-own-life. Some may rely on adolescence once again, and the naivety factor that is supposed to come along with it; others would turn to the truth-telling essayistic rhetoric, considering the distance they have with themselves. There’s no reason to take for granted the usual, inevitable, forms-of-life and self-assured acts-of-thought. “In youth we are, but in age we seem.” Is that to say we never become?

It’s not so much that moods and affects have to be kept secret and hidden. Do we have to say it once more – they’re structured through déjà-vu, and we already found most of the words for them in half-forgotten songs and brusque quotes. What matters, tonight, is what is behind the scene, not as something mysterious, or as one of the last tricks in the sleeve; but as the dailyness of things, the eventlyness of it all: the course of our lives, observed from too close a distance, in the middle of affairs. In the shadow of a moment things are irrevocably done – as if there was no time to say, “yes” with any conviction.

Something ever comes of all persistent inquiry; we are not so continually curious for nothing. We may already be over-fond of a certain imaginary image of our lives and friends; and then refer to a certain imagined ghost of that same imagined image. What is at stake is not the search for the “right” stuff or position – it’s the possibility to deal with prerequisites in order to twist the game.