MONUMENT TO TRANSFORMATION

Monument  to Transformation
CENTRO CULTURAL MONTEHERMOSO KULTURUNEA
Fray Zacarías Martínez  2 / 01001 Vitoria-Gasteiz
February 12th– May 2nd, 2010
The exhibition is organized by tranzit and Centro cultural Montehermoso Kulturunea
General partner of the Monument to Transformation project: ERSTE Foundation
www.montehermoso.net
www.monumenttotransformaiton.org

„One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.“……“What’s happened to me,” he thought. It was no dream. His room, a proper room for a human being, only somewhat too small, lay quietly between the four well-known walls.“ 1

„Establishing our overall goals is something we usually have difficulty
doing effectivelly. It is only in moments of systemic bifuracrtion,
of historical transition, that the possibility becomes real. It is at these
moments, in what I call transformational TimeSpace... .“2

The exhibition presents the outcome of more than two years of researching „social transformation“ in the countries that underwent a transformation from the totlitarian regimes. It is conceived as an imaginative and analytical space that – with a certain distance – enables the visitor to see and reflect the processes of change that started by the fall of the Iron Curtain (1989) in Eastern Europe, Student demonstrations in Indeonesia in 1998 or Revolution in South Korea (1987) and have to an extent continued until the present. The way this topic is approached is influenced by a feeling of affiliation to these changes which are in a way co-formed by us and whose impact affects and influences us. It is therefore an attempt to look at “transformation” as at a “lived out” and gradually receding process.
The curators do not believe that art can provide any direct and easily applicable answers to political and social problems and conflicts. Art does however create a space which provides the basic pre-requisites on which thinking, dreaming and discussions about politics and society are based.
Thinking about transformation is conceived as structured in tension between various methods of social sciences and artistic practice. The experience of transformation in “Eastern Europe” is an independent theoretical field. In the context of transformation studies, the so-called Eastern European region has its own specifics that originated in the geo-political division of the world, irrevocably decided at the Jalta conference as a consequence of the 2nd World War. The power division of the world into East and West can no longer be mechanically adopted without reservation – it cannot be used when trying to understand the processes of cultural signifying, cultural production and representation in that region. If one automatically accepts such a division, one assumes that those geo-political power polarities are recognizable in the “cultural material” – which means that cultural production is not viewed a priori, as creation, as a polluting semiosis, but as a mere representative of the recognizability of the East-West power polarity.
While researching transformation processes, we abandoned the reductive theories of the region that we come from and that we represent. We extended research to artistic and theoretical outputs that reflect the transformations in Greece, Spain, South Korea, Romania, Serbia, Indonesia, Mexico and others. The attempt to newly formulate trans-local specifics of transformation meant to abandon the stigmatic construction of so-called “Eastern Europe” and opt for a differentiated, authoritative and new map of the world of transformation.
One of the possible ways how to approach this exhibition is to see it as a “rhizomatic” structure. In the terminology of archaeology, it means a layer with various artifacts that are mutually connected. The exhibition presents a group of theoretical and artistic outputs that go back together to a certain time and place and represent a sum of past activities. The motif of this common return to the past is the need to destroy the clarity and definiteness of the view of the “transformation” that one has gained through individual experience. This is almost an ontological need to subvert the essence of one’s own experience with this past – it is necessary to shed paranoia on the things recently lived. The suspected and experienced contradiction, conflict and complexity of the transformation period are negated by too much clarity and trust in one’s own experience. The only past is the “present past”: therefore we carry out this attack on the “clear” representation of the transformation period with respect to the current state of thoughts and to the “future pasts” that we try to provoke in this way.

1 Franz Kafka, “Metamorphosis,” in Short stories (Prague: Vyšehrad, 2005), 63.
2 Immanuel Wallerstein, Utopistics (New York: The New Press, 1998), 2.

Monument_to_Transformation_in_Montehermoso.doc