bandeira, 2026coffee filter paper and sewing thread
approx. 200 x 150 cm

bandeira was made for Act1, an occupation that took place at Surinameplein, Amsterdam, in the container part of the renovation of the historical Klokkenhof building.
Following is the text from Alex Kahn, written for the exhibition:
"
THE NEUTRAL CONTAINER
by Alex Kahn


We shouldn't see an art institution as an enabling container/neutral enabler of culture, MV suggests.(1) Instead: as a node in the patterning and reproducing of social life, as an infrastructure. Like a road, an electricity grid, a supply chain, a shipping container, a ship.(2)Among infrastructures not at all neutral, making possible some lives and foreclosing others.



From the gallery as an infrastructure, to infrastructure as a gallery. Have we looped right back to where we started? Things sure look the same from here. The exhibition outside the gallery, the shipping container outside the port, but neither of them outside of value or capital or anything at all. In the thick, implicated, overdetermined.(3)
(Maybe there's a breathing place that comes with the repetition, the citation, the displacement. Maybe, the difference between the form and the imprint it left on the grass.)


The neutral container is an impossibility, then. A space in a language in a luxury flats development that was once a squat in a neighbourhood that's named after a colonial project in a city that's so smooth you wouldn't look twice at the pop-up exhibition in the shipping container opposite the tram stop. But those are always the grounds we're working on, a terrain already fully occupied.


And yet: things have their gaps, don't they? That's another kind of non-neutral-ness:(4) everything is contradictory somehow(5), there's a place where things don't quite coincide with themselves, a cut that could maybe become a wound, maybe.(6) The glass is always half empty. The container is always empty, whatever it's full of.


The gallery, the supply chain, the genre, the frame, the form, the container are always laying the terrain.(7) This isn't just a restriction, it's an enabling constraint, it's the conditions of possibility as such. Artworks happening within and often against, within and against - their containers. And there are other things happening within and against their containers all the time, thinking that tugs at thought, struggle that tugs at class.
(I'm thinking here of a kind of recursivity, the torsion of trying to look at the soles of your feet while standing on them)


The interesting question is maybe not so much can a shipping container be an art exhibition? But maybe can an art exhibition he something other than a shipping container?(8) Cuts against flow, form against form. A kind of torsion, contorting, letting the light in, pulling into view a container that is indigent and distorted, and neutral in some sense and in no sense at all. (9) (10) (11)

-
  1. Marina Vishmidt, Infrastructural Critique Between Reproduction and Abolition 
  2. see Zandi Sherman, 'Infrastructures and the Ontological Question of Race 
  3. "To quote a text involves the interruption of its context” Benjamin, "What is Epic Theatre?" see Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 
  4. “what if reality is not neutral, but torn by an inherent impossibility and contradiction?” Alenka Zupancic, What is Sex? 
  5. “a field that is not only immense but also full of cracks” Adorno, Philosophical Elements for a Theory of Society 
  6. see Berlant and Edelman on optimism in Sex, or the Unbearable 
  7. (think of modernist art problematising form and genre, Malevich pushing at the frame, Joyce pushing at language, Brecht pushing at the audience)
  8. old news, we've been to NDSM, we've been to Hackney Wick, we could make a show out of anything, or nothing, we know that a 'machine which is not active in the labour process is useless... Living labour must...change them from merely possible into real and effective use-values. Marx, Capital 
  9. Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People
  10. Andrea Long Chu, "The Pink"
  11. Adorno, Minima Moralia                
"
participants:
- Alex Kahn
- Beni Conrad
- Florian Sigl
- Germain Marengo
- Luca Mosbech
- Matteo Rattini
- Toni Kronwitter
- Yasmine Chiboub
CAFE COM LEITE
BANDEIRA
ESPECTROS
RE.CYCLE
EFEMERIDES
MEIA-VOLTA
 AND WHEN THE WIND STOPS BLOWING ?
FANTASMAGORIES
    EN MEME TEMPS, D’AUTRES
ATLANTIC
SPAARNDAMMERMEUBELS
  THE UNTRUTHS OF NEVER