Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann: In the Stomach of the Predators at BAK basis voor actuele kunst In the Stomach of the Predators, a two-part exhibition by Berlin-based artists, curators, and theorists Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann, explores the predatory logic of advanced capitalism. Stemming from their joint research in the last several years concerning the privatization of the commons through the cases of seeds, land rights, and intellectual property, these two distinct bodies of work employ the methods and languages of theatrical and filmic stagings (Creischer) and pictorial tableaux (Siekmann). The installation of Siekmann takes us to the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen where the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a project set up to “protect” all existing agricultural kernels in the world from eventual extinction, is based. We learn, however, that the seed bank is financed by the very same corporate lobbies that exercise interests and practices that threaten crop diversity, including, among others, genetic manipulation. These entangled complicities are uncovered through large movable panels with pictograms, reminiscent of the vocabulary developed by science philosopher and political economist Otto Neurath in cooperation with artist Gerd Arntz, who was a part of an anarcho-syndicalist movement in the 1920s in Cologne and Berlin, developing graphic icons specifically for proletarian agitations. The ordered, systematic, and meticulously structured succession of signs, symbols, and their visualized interconnections draw an alarming relational map of the economic and political aspects of biodiversity’s transfer into private hands that so accurately defines our global present. e-flux/announcements/alice-creischer-and-andreas-siekmann/
Posted on: Mon, 17 Nov 2014 01:55:52 +0000
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