Upcoming: The Imaginary Republic Part 1 & 2

09. – 18. September / 22. September – 16. October

Hélène Frichot, Luis Guerra, Marianne Heier, Georgia Kotretsos,
Brandon LaBelle, Marysia Lewandowska, Sala-manca and Lise Skou

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OPENING: The Imaginary Republic (Part 1)

Welcome to the opening of the first part of The Imaginary Republic, Friday 9th of September at 19:00h!

The Imaginary Republic is a research project developed by Brandon LaBelle. During September and October the project will take the form of an exhibition at Tag Team Studio, showing works by national and international artists, including Marianne Heier, Marysia Lewandowska, Hélène Frichot, Luis Guerra, Georgia Kotretsos, Brandon LaBelle, Sala-manca, and Lise Skou. Through propositional and speculative works the exhibition, presented in two editions, focuses on questions and experiences of public life and culture.

PART 1:
Artists:
Kotretsos, Guerra, Heier, LaBelle
Opening hours:
September 10th – 18th
Saturdays & Sundays: 12:00 – 17:00h
Weekdays: by appointment

PART 2:
Artists:
Frichot, Lewandowska, Rotman, Skou
Opening hours:
September 22nd – October 16th
Saturdays & Sundays: 12:00 – 17:00h
Weekdays: by appointment

The exhibition is held in conjunction with the Partisan Café event program:
Marianne Heier / September 8th – 17:00h
Marysia Lewandowska, Lise Skou / September 23rd – 17:00h
Diego Rotman (Sala-manca Group), Brandon LaBelle / September 24th – 17:00h

Please note that the second part of the exhibition opens on a Thursday, not on a Friday.
For more info on the project, see the detailed description below.

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The Imaginary Republic looks at questions of public life and civic culture in today’s global environment, and considers how ongoing economic, social and political unrest has led to an intensification of grass-roots initiatives, artistic activism, alternative instituting and forms of commoning.

As a network of related participants, the project develops through shared methods and modes of experimental pedagogy, critical togetherness, public and creative instituting, and looks to identify through their expressions possibilities for political imagining. The political imagination is posited as a tool for problematizing and negotiating contemporary crises, enabling an understanding of public assembly as being founded upon intensely creative and psychic labors that equally contain secret desires, generative noises, breaks in identity and community, and assemblages of deviant knowledge.

In his book, Disagreement, Jacques Rancière identifies two sides to the governmental, what he calls “the political” and “the police”. As he states, often what we imagine as “the political” is only a mode of policing. Such a dichotomous view, while providing an important perspective, may overlook the more nuanced, in-between articulations found in grass-roots movements, civic cultures, radical dreaming, unlikely friendships and acts of (non)work, the daily rituals and encounters between neighbors and strangers, as well as the deep poetics of relating to what is not yet, through which agency and collective actions find their future footing.

The exhibition at Tag Team Studios, divided into two editions, brings together works, propositions, and documents that consider relations between individual determination and social and institutional structures. Questions of art and economy, biopolitics and vacancy, transience, piracy and infrastructures of the poor are brought forward as critical and creative arenas of struggle.

The exhibition is presented in collaboration with the Partisan Café, and includes three evening events with participating artists.
See more info here.

Organized with support from the Bergen Academy of Art and Design.