[artinfo] CAPITAL (It Fails Us Now) at Kunstihoone in Tallinn (Estonia)

[e-Flux]

CAPITAL (It Fails Us Now)
at Kunstihoone in Tallinn, Estonia
7 Jan–15 Feb 2006

<http://www.kunstihoone.ee>http://www.kunstihoone.ee


Capital (It Fails Us Now) is a group show 
exploring the notion of capital, taking point of 
departure along dual lines; on the one hand 
location, and on the other subjectivity; how 
capitalism affects our daily lives, our very 
structure of feelings and perceptions. Capital 
understood as an economic tool, as a measure of 
exchange and surplus, and as something at once 
regulated and regulating (by both state and 
market), as well as a producer of subjectivity 
(the commodification of everything).

The exhibition in Tallinn is the second half of a 
two-fold project, with the first part taking 
place at UKS in Oslo, Norway 8 Oct–6 Nov 2005.

Curated by Simon Sheikh. Produced by NIFCA, 
Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art, in 
collaboration with Kunstihoone in Tallinn, 
Estonia, and UKS in Oslo, Norway.

Participating artists:
Michael Blum, Andrea Creutz, Copenhagen Free 
University, Regina Dold, Maria Eichhorn, Katia 
Fouquet, Florian Gass, Stephan Geene, Ashley 
Hunt, Susan Kelly & Stephen Morton, Marietta 
Kesting, Oliver Ressler, Natascha Sadr 
Haghighian, Katya Sander, Fia Stina Sandlund, 
Jason Simon, What Is To Be Done?, Elin Wikström, 
Knut Åsdam .


The exhibition focuses on the current moment in 
history, with its structural changes, and, 
arguably, crisis, within global capital, and look 
at the two specific locations as models, as 
machinery within the production and proliferation 
of capital. Partly, the Western European model of 
the welfare state is undergoing a massive 
structural change, if not deconstruction. This 
can also be seen in the refined versioning of the 
welfare state, the Nordic social democratic model 
of redistribution and equilibrium; a compromise 
between liberalism and socialism, but also a 
temporal territorial alliance between capital and 
labour that is now historical. This also in the 
case on the margins of the new Europe, with the 
rapid and massive deregulation of the post 
communist countries, where the former state 
capitalism is being transformed into a 
neoliberal, transnational market system. But how 
do these formations, or versionings, affect each 
other? What are the routes between them, and are 
they tending towards merger and secession? What 
are “new” economies, and what kinds of 
technologies of the self are they producing, and 
indeed, enforcing? The project is, then, to 
discuss these specific model of capital and 
(cultural) production and how we can visualize 
the current changes. We therefore propose to look 
at art production, not only as commodity 
production, but also as a means of visualizing 
and discussing complex mechanisms of 
subjectivities. As a place for imagining models 
for a post- or anti-commodified subject position. 
If Michel Foucault could write about the 
’non-fascist life’, can we imagine the 
non-capitalistic subject? And what will this 
entail in terms of economic and social relations 
living within capitalism?

A book including artistic contributions and 
essays from Will Bradley, Katja Diefenbach, 
Stephan Geene, Brian Holmes, Trude Iversen, Oleg 
Kireev, Isabell Lorey, Gerald Raunig and Natascha 
Sadr Haghighian will be published by b_books in 
January 2006.

For more information please contact: project 
coordinator Mitro Kaurinkoski at NIFCA, 
mitro.kaurinkoski at nifca.org, tel. +358 9 686 43 
105 or curator Anders Härm at Kunstihoone, 
anders at kunstihoone.ee, tel. +372 6442 818.