DaDaDa: Strategies Against Marketecture

Pil and Galia Kollectiv are an artist couple from Jerusalem, Israel, who moved to England a couple of years ago. I got to know them through Chicks on Speed -- how else -- when the Chix performed in Israel in 2000 for an event called Trash which was organized by Pil and Galia, and I put a photo report of that event to pHinnWeb's CoS page. We got in e-mail correspondence, and now they're having an exhibition at London's Temporary Contemporary Gallery, and asked for my pHinnMilk Comics collages to be displayed there too. There will be a computer at the gallery on which one can browse through pHinnMilk Comics. I guess it's unnecessary to say that I'm pretty excited about my own "outsider art" being exposed this way...


DaDaDa: Strategies Against Marketecture
Curated by Pil & Galia Kollectiv

@ Temporary Contemporary
2nd Floor, Atlantic House
The Old Seager Distillery
Deptford Bridge
London SE8 4JT
UK

22 October - 21 November, 2004
Fri-Sun 12-6pm

Private View: Thursday 21st October 18.30-22.00

The exhibition is a unique opportunity to explore the visual aesthetics of resistance. Taking in work that mixes up art, music and design, artists from the US, Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Japan, Finland and the UK, provide a critical and often playful opposition to contemporary hyper-structured consumer culture. 'DaDaDa: Strategies against Marketecture' deals in appropriation & DIY revolution, craft & hi-tech collage through 2D, video, music and installation pieces that examine the relationship between present technologies and the more traditional cut and paste methods employed by ideologically motivated artists in the twentieth century, a movement from Mertz assemblages to current computer screen manipulations.

As well as a live performance from Anat Ben-David on the opening night, the exhibition will be accompanied by a fanzine format catalogue with texts by Amanda Beech and Avi Pitchon and a limited edition compilation CD featuring: 3puen, Anat Ben David, Charlie Megira, Chicks on Speed, DAT Politics, Gelbart, Frederik Schikowski, Simon Bookish and Patrick Wolf.

Strategien gegen Architekturen (vols. I-III) is a series of three compilations documenting the music of German industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten, famed for their attempts to conquer the repressed rebuilt surfaces of postwar Berlin by beating on the physical structures of the city and using them as instruments. "Far from suggesting that the buildings should be destroyed, they attempted to release the cacophony they perceived to be trapped within the static forms, motivating the energy potential in solid objects". As for marketecture, nobody's quite sure what that is. The Internet's Word Spy dictionary has it that it is:

marketecture (mar.kuh.TEK.chur) n. 1. A new computer architecture that is being marketed aggressively despite the fact that it doesn't yet exist as a finished product. 2. The design and structure of a market or a marketing campaign. Also: marchitecture.

Elsewhere it is refered to as the business perspective of the system's architecture.

To us, however, it is like Einstürzende Neubauten¹s city, a repressed, hyperdefined space that needs to be conquered. We are surrounded by the collapsing new buildings of mass mediated consumer culture, which we seek not to destroy but to make our own, to release their buried meanings. These are the raw materials on which we impose our strategies.

The exhibition features artists, writers and musicians, who each strategically position themselves in relation to this great living/dead cityscape. Some find ready made objects, sounds, ideas in the debris, using them against the grain to reveal a truer nature. Others add pixel to pixel or frame to frame to explore the beauty seen only through the eye of the machine. Some see spaceships in tea cups, insects in shopping carts, pagans in Tesco, erotic eruptions in videogame consoles and wonderful weird druid songs in polyphonic ring tones. Others dance to a different tune, recorded on makeshift instruments in a bedroom all their own. This is democracy with a Œd¹ for d.i.y., and you're welcome to make your own.

Artists: Anat Ben-David, Jessica Broas, Chicks on Speed, DAT Politics, Christopher Dobrowolski, Pil & Galia Kollectiv, Mister Ministeck, Noriko Okaku, Erkki Rautio, ROR (Revolutions on Request), Hiraki Sawa, Hideyuki Sawayanagi, Dallas Seitz.

A review @ BBC site (with image gallery)

http://www.kollectiv.co.uk/

See also:

Turn to the Left