Temporary autonomous research : Falke Pisano, Jeremiah Day, Nicoline van Harskamp

The 9th edition of the Shanghai Biennale, curated by Qiu Zhijie, Jens Hoffman, Boris Groys and Johnson Chang has made room for some thirty city pavilions presenting parallel to the main exhibition. That novel curatorial project with a presentation of worldwide platforms involving cities related in some way to Shanghai will show art practices closely connected to the theme of the current Shanghai Biennale. Cities such as Auckland, Bandung, Berlin, Tehran, Moscow, Vancouver, Istanbul, Dakar, Detroit and Amsterdam are all cities invited to participate in the city pavilions.

The City of Amsterdam is characterized by an important historical connotation: it has always been a transparent synonym for a refuge for diversity, for thinking and being different-than-others. Amsterdam could, therefore, be understood as a potential temporary autonomous environment where non-conformist forms of research and knowledge production have continuously been offered shelter since the early days of the 17th century. This inextricable form of signification understood in a broad and metaphorical sense is the point of departure for the themes the Amsterdam Pavilion will address during the 9th Shanghai Biennale.

Falke Pisano’s project The Body in Crisis investigates what role representation can play in staging the experience of a continuous state of crisis the body winds up in as a consequence of political, social, and economic transformations throughout history. What kind of forces affect the body? How do historical representations function in their original contexts? And most importantly, how could one activate historical turns and their relevance for the current conditions within topical visual art? In the formalization of the distance inherent in each representation, Pisano specifically notices possibilities to arrive at a temporary, permanently repeating obstruction and a liberation of the semiotic triangle of object-representation-subject.

Jeremiah Day’s work LA Homicide departs from the website of the Los Angeles Times. On that site, the newspaper gives a historical account of the daily victims of street violence in the “global slums” of Los Angeles. Day deploys these historical data as starting point. He visits the crime scenes, photographs them, and provides them with handwritten comments. In combination with cinematographic observation, these texts produce a certain connection between brutal, historical reality and the topical Hollywood paradigm that, resigned in a certain fatal consciousness, no longer believes in the narrative of the problem-solving capacity of human beings. Against this anthropological condition, artists can only place their own body, Day claims, a performative act entirely in line with Hannah Arendt’s thought where action is understood as an autonomous activity in public space.

Nicoline van Harskamp’s research, Yours in Solidarity, demands attention for anarchism as a historical movement. To that end, Van Harskamp analyses correspondences of late 20th-century Amsterdam protagonists. Her project consists of an archiving textual, presentation of original quotations articulating various aspects of the once personally experienced and spent moments of micro-politics. In addition, interviews are conducted with actors playing the authors of the letters. From our time dominated by a post-fordist concept of performance and a neo-liberal context prioritizing the economic realm, the actors speculate how they would re-think and re-activate an awareness of the “temporary autonomous zone.”