Something in the air

Storm the palace! Raid the prison! Burn down the disco! Revolution is stirring at the Unicredit Pavilion

October 2009 - From the Print Edition

At the time of writing Romania’s streets are not yet packed with striking judges, teachers and doctors looting the malls of Bucharest, as they scramble for food and clothes that they cannot afford due to their breadline salaries and a collapsing local currency.
Nevertheless the threat of protests and over-reaction by security forces is now a global worry, triggering art space Pavilion Unicredit to open a multimedia exhibition exploring unrest and repression.
At times of social upheaval, art tends to be polarised into either being branded ‘political’ or ‘escapist’ and these works fall firmly in the former camp.
There is straightforward activism in documentaries such as Renzo Martens’s 90-minute ‘Enjoy Poverty’, exposing big business indifference to malnourished children in Congo plantations. A cultural revolt takes place in the video loop of ‘Un Chant D’Amour’, Jean Genet’s soft-core spectacular showing men romping together in prison.
On display are works from Argentina’s ‘Taller Popular de Serigrafia’, a protest movement which uses screen-printing on T-shirts and posters as a means for demonstrators to react quickly to political events. These images and slogans have now graduated to become cultural artefacts, similar to Republican posters from the Spanish civil war.
Meanwhile Romanian artist Sebastian Moldovan has placed a pile of walking sticks against a black background as a metaphor for the nullifying influence of geriatric leadership on the Romanian political and cultural scene and the nihilism this inspires in the younger generation.
How much of this work is agit-prop and how much is pure art? Can the visuals from a protest be branded art when their purpose is political change? If such art is an agent of social transformation, does that make it cultural valuable?
All these dilemmas are worth examining while the glass walls of this gallery still remain intact. ■
Michael Bird

Exploring the Return of Repression
Pavilion Unicredit, 1 Soseaua Nicolae Titulescu
Open Tues to Fri: 12:00 to 19:00 hrs
Sat to Sun: 14:00 to 21:00 hrs. Until 22 November