A fascinating group exhibition opened just days ago at AMP Gallery entitled Until the End of the World. Curated by Max Henry, the exhibition occupies the entire building and includes works by Erik Parker (issue 1 of THE NEW ORDER), Dan Attoe, Lutz Braun, Daniel Guzman, Bendix Harms, Armen Eloyan, Richard Jackson, Andreas Hofer, Tillman Kaiser, Dionisis Kavallieratos, Agnieszka Kurant, Ann Lislegaard, Justin Lowe, Renzo Martens, Rallou Panagiotou, Rudolf Polanszky, Katrin Plavčak/ Johanna Kirsch, Stephen G. Rhodes, Royal Robertson, Peter Saul, Steven Shearer, Tamuna Sirbiladze, Ryan Trecartin, Anetta Mona Chisa/Lucia Tkácová, Sislej Xhafa.
Until the End of the World is a quixotic, narrative driven show of art in all media. Its reference point is the eponymous 1991 Wim Wenders apocalyptic road movie. Through his overarching filmic structure Wenders lyrically deconstructs what he called the “disease of images” in order to locate a semblance of truth and subjectivity. A presage of today’s technologically entrapped culture of death, virtual and real imagery, globalization, industrial espionage, and unhinged society its also comments on human frailty, dreams, love, and romance.
For the ancient metropolis of Athens with its layers of history and film noir resonance built into its urban fabric, the show is in line with apokálupsis eschaton, a term that translates to “revelation at the end of the eon”, or “lifting of the veil”, and is often used to describe the end of the world.
It’s an old adage that out of chaos there is order; as such the show seeks to demarcate a zone of stability in the contemporary art constellation.
In observing its regional pathology and the paralysis of its own on-going calamitous history (to paraphrase Guy Debord) the show is cognizant of the new phenomena of a Mediterranean Situationism that dissents from the ineffectual social model called globalization. An excerpted Greek anarchist chronicle will thus be presented as a bracket to the international context of contemporary art. Storytelling hereby underscores the premise of multiple viewpoints; utilizing myth and folklore the individual voice acts as metaphor for the underbelly of civilization: repression and lack of freedom, terror and violence, hubris and madness, the patently absurd. There are levels of meaning throughout, a visceral directness that flat-lines and cuts through the impotence of collectivist angst. The end of the world has not come, only ciphered into an off-key that contemporary art tunes to its own bell.
In the global cultural sphere we must reconsider image production amidst the outworn symbols of an era already passing away. Therefore art is a contemporary talisman with an existential worldview, its contextual discourse is the sharp edge of a good sword that slices up and undermines the entrenched culture system with its new, often dubious models
