Lene
Berg, Stalin
by Picasso or Portrait of a Woman with Moustache, 2008.
Façade-banner. Courtesy the artist.
In
Amos Tutuola’s 1954 novel My
Life in the Bush of Ghosts,
the young protagonist is running away from slave-catchers when he
accidently crosses the border of reality as he knows it. His flight
from bondage, however, does not earn him freedom. Rather, he finds
himself in an absurd, liminal world of conversing symbols and
delirious phantasms, in which the entire regime of meaning-production
is subject to tectonic shifts. Tutuola—whose idiosyncratic use of
English language and Yoruba folklore propelled a battle of
interpretations—would later become a member of the Mbari Clubs, the
first of which was established in Ibadan in 1961. These cultural
centers, initiated by the German-Jewish expatriate Ulli Beier, were a
gathering place for a generation of African artists, writers, and
musicians. Together, they spearheaded a renaissance of Yoruba
culture.
One
of the sponsors of the Mbari Clubs was the Paris-based Congress for
Cultural Freedom (CCF), an organization founded in West Berlin in
June 1950 by a group of writers driven to consolidate an
"anti-totalitarian" intellectual community. Its ten-year
anniversary was celebrated at the then newly inaugurated
Kongresshalle, today’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt. With offices in
more then 30 countries, the CCF subsidized countless cultural
programs from Latin America to Africa and Southeast Asia, developing
a network of journals, conferences, and exhibitions that advanced a
"universal" language of modernism in literature, art, and
music. By 1967, it was revealed that the CCF was secretly bankrolled
by America’s espionage arm, the Central Intelligence Agency. The
CIA scandal confirmed the lingering suspicion that had trailed the
CCF from the days of its origin: not quite an autonomous entity, the
organisation had been enlisted in shoring up an anti-Communist
consensus in the service of US hegemony during the Cultural Cold War.
The disclosure destroyed the CCF’s reputation, exposing the
ideological contradictions and moral ambiguities of advocating
freedom and transparency by means that are themselves outside of
democratic accountability.
The
term "parapolitics" refers to the use of soft power in the
Cold War. Employing the history of the Congress for Cultural Freedom
as an optical device, the project brings Picasso’s famous dictum
"art is a lie that tells truth" into relation with
the work of an intelligence agency whose "art lies in concealing
the means by which it is achieved."
In
the shadowy underside of liberal consensus, freedom appears as always
contingent on its foreclosures. Tracing tectonic shifts in
intellectual affiliations across political conflict lines through the
20th century, the exhibition explores artistic strategies of
engagement and subversion. It underlines how the play with meaning in
an increasingly conceptually and semantically oriented world of art
production has acted on the assertion of an endangered, precarious
autonomy. Within the choreography of parapolitics, the canon of the
Cold War modernism becomes a bush of ghosts.
Parapolitics brings
together archival documents and artworks from the 1930s to the
present by artists that prefigure and reflect the ideological and
formal struggles arising from the cultural Cold War, but also works
by contemporary artists critically reassessing the normalized
narratives of modernism. It features magazines such as Der
Monat (Germany), Encounter (UK), Sasanggye (South
Korea), Quest (India), Africa
South (South
Africa), Black
Orpheus (Nigeria), Transition(Uganda
/ Ghana), The
New African (South
Africa), Hiwar(Lebanon),
and Mundo
Nuevo (Latin
America), that were either initiated or at times supported by the
Congress for Cultural Freedom.
With
works by Art
& Language, Doug Ashford, Michael Baers, Antonina Baever,
Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck (with Media Farzin and Paolo Gasparini),
Robert Barry, Romare Bearden, Samuel Beckett, Lene Berg, Broomberg
and Chanarin, Fernando Bryce, Daniel Buren, Luis Camnitzer, Alice
Creischer, Didactic Exhibition, Liu Ding, Charles and Ray Eames,
Miklos Erdély, Peter Friedl, Liam Gillick, Sheela Gowda, Philip
Guston, Gruppe Gummi K, Max de Haas, Chia Wei Hsu, Iman Issa, Voluspa
Jarpa, David Lamelas, Jacob Lawrence, Norman Lewis, İlhan Mimaroğlu,
Moiseyev Dance Company, Museum of American Art in Berlin, Solomon
Nikritin, Irving Norman, Guillermo Nuñez, Branwen Okpako, Boris
Ondreička, Nam June Paik, Décio Pignatari, Howardena Pindel, Sigmar
Polke, Rebecca H. Quaytman, Walid Raad, Steve Reich, Ad Reinhardt,
Gerhard Richter, Faith Ringgold, Norman Rockwell, Peter Roehr, Martha
Rosler, Charles Shaw, Yashas Shetty, Francis Newton Souza, Frank
Stella, The Otolith Group, Endre Tót, Suzanne Treister, Twins Seven
Seven, Josip Vaništa, Wolf Vostell, and Susanne
Wenger.
An
accompanying conference titled "Freedom
in the Bush of Ghosts" will
be held on December 15 and 16, 2017 at Haus der Kulturen der Welt.
Curated
by Anselm
Franke, Nida Ghouse, Paz Guevara,
and Antonia
Majaca.
https://www.hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/2017/parapolitics/parapolitics_start.php
