System & Error
Exhibition: 23rd February / 4th March
Off-season Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia (EKKM),
Opening Party: 18:00 / Friday 23rd
Ordinary life is made of eventful junctures, constant surprises and adjustments that go beyond all attempts to rigorously plan and design things. Infrastructures crack, smart phones make errors, printers print funny stuff, states fail and the financial market fall into cyclical crises; Also our body can react strangely. All these failures have an aura though: they do not occur twice in the same way and produce the adrenaline of edges. Paraphrasing Tolstoy, all the families are successful alike, but failed in their own unique way.
The artworks of this exhibition have been produced honouring the meaning of collaboration, since the groups of artists are composed with MA students from Aalto University and from the Estonian Academy of Arts, which adds to the exhibition a reflection about the risks, potentials and failures of cooperation between artists and between institutions. For the exhibition, students have engaged with how misbehaviours and things out of place constitute a terrain of experimentation, addressing different meanings of systems, randomness and dead ends, and facing questions such as:
- Do failures need an excuse?
- What does an error look like?
- What is the benefit of being part of a system?
- How much tolerance for the non-perfect do our societies have?
- Is a list of failures more revealing than a list of successes?
- Are gaps, holes, tricksters and hackers part of the system or the error?
- In which ways systems are organised by defining some practices as normal and some others as deviant (noise, dirt, queer…)?
- And does anything right might come from pursuing wrong practices?
Curator: Francisco Martínez
Graphic designer Heleliis Hõim
Artists:
- Madis Kurss & Martha Jessen
- Mirka Sulander & Elina Saat
- Hanna Perälä & Heleliis Hõim
- Sandra Schneider, Anu Jalas & Kadi Reintamm
- Uzair Amjad, Aman Askarizad & Aap Jaapan
- Ana Fernandes & Mark Antonious Puhkan
- Solveig Lill & Tuomas Lehtomaa
- Elham Rahmati, Danai Anagnostou & Heidi Paju