Escape as work in process…

CURATORIAL MULLINGS


Escape as work in process…

In the sphere of communication, there is something that exceeds the process of meaning making, something that can’t be captured by the language of articulation-communication. This ‘something’ and its power to exceed, and sometimes disrupt the meaning making process, is crucial in the context of art. The reason to make art, create a form and expression is not to limit itself to the communication and a defined meaning but, to open a space of sensation and an experience and this power cannot be translated through explanation.

Escape is about escape itself, not a movement from one situation to another. Escape is an inevitable condition of radical possibility of any ideal system of politics, culture and society. Any ideal system would always have its own gaps, inconsistencies, leakages that create the ground for radical political space to participate in the system from the very location of those inconsistencies. Escape is one of the forms and strategies of participating in the system through its gaps and leaks by displaying those gaps, those fallacies.

Escape is a demonstration of failure, of the conventions and structure of language, systems of order and control, of the promise of modern technocratic and economic emancipation. It is the demonstration of the redundancy of political questions, aesthetic imperatives and capitalist cultural conventions. But Escape in its verb form provides a positive artistic context to explore. It offers a positive condition of failure, incomprehension, leakage, slippage and fissure of the orders and structures of communication through which we recognize ourselves.

Escape is a condition of choice when there is no possibility of active political engagement, as well as when one cannot submit to the dominant ideology of the statist politics.  Escape is a tactic, an act, a gesture that produces a new form of political expression.