Untitled - EMAF

AUSSTELLUNG // EXHIBITION
SMART ART
At its exhibition, the European Media Art Festival presents works that question social conventions, that
remove the known and the familiar from their contexts in surprising ways, and that highlight the absurdities of
individual and social everyday life. The approaches range from popular subject matters to provocative statements
that seek new methods of artistic debate in film, installation and expanded media with the playful and intelligent
use of media. With video, light and computer installations or kinetic objects, the artists follow the changes of the
idea/concept of the image and develop new positions of contemporary media art. The basic conditions of contemporary
art production are investigated, the possibilities offered by galleries are explored and the limitations of the
system of art are constantly proven. The permanent new definition of contemporary art does not stop at media
art. Curious and eager to take risks, it offers relevant stimuli for society and the individual. It behaves cheekily
towards traditional codes and habits. Interwoven with a multitude of references to not only (the history of) art
and art work but also to social and personal situations, the artists constantly review their methods of procedure.
What talented young artists and acknowledged masters have in common is their wish to undermine traditional
codes and the canon of formal habits, or to interpret them critically, going against the grain.
Poetic descriptions of journey, the artistic questioning of one's own identity and social reality, or the portrayal
of the condition of our fully mediatised society, characterised by a commercialised ›Leitkultur‹, are subjects that
are dealt with in documentary and staged forms, performance works or as campaign art and spatial interventions.
The city will also be used for projections of an art guerilla that conquers it with campaigns from the nonsensical
to the paradoxical, forming an antithesis to the extensive world of visual messages portrayed by goods,
the pleasure imperative, and the dictates of wellness and news of catastrophes.
With a wide variety of strategies, personalities from the art world process their experiences and reflections.
Some positions and developments of society - of the economy, design, advertising and popular culture - are broken
in their literal sense, taken apart, put back together again and, in doing so, their symbols become modulated or
radically condemned, freely adapted from Roland Barthes' question ›Doesn't the best method of subversion lie in
assembling the codes rather than destroying them?‹
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