Resistance is Fertile / Resistance is Futile
In correspondence with the traffic lights down the road, the message jumps between action and passivity, between motion and standstill, hope and disbelieve. It is a gesture of double-mindedness and hesitation between two opposites, while there’s no middle course.
Located along a busy street in Amsterdam (Stadhouderskade), the work involves passers-by, cyclists and chauffeurs into a public negotiation that may seem political and topical, yet as significantly applies to a variety of situations we encounter in our daily private lives. At the same time the work functions as an ironic slogan in the midst of other lit textual signs and marquees aiming at selling goods and communicating political and social gestures.
Resistance is Fertile / Resistance is Futile was first presented at the Kunsthaus in Graz, as part of the exhibition Protections (2006) curated by Adam Budak and Christine Peters.
Opening
On the occasion of the opening you are gradually invited to join us for informal drinks in the company of the artist Warren Neidich on Thursday, February 9, from 5 until 7 PM.
Works
The work of Warren Neidich lies at the crossroad between art, philosophy, politics and neuroscience, something he refers to as 'Neurobiopolitics' and 'Neuropower'. The work Resistance is Futile / Resistance is Fertile, 2006 - 2012 stems from his ongoing research on the modes and meaning of cognitive work in our contemporary society. Warren Neidich states: "As late capitalism directs its attention towards immaterial labor and cognitive work, the functioning of mind and brain are gaining importance for the production of capital. While the pharmaceutical market of attention and memory drugs is booming, the use of special effects in films and currently also in advertising and sports news programs hyper-stimulate emotional centers located deep in our primitive brain, producing an over excited and labile subject. Additionally, the new field of consumer neuroscience in which computerized scanning machines track the brain’s responses to product choice and political personages, create new forms of post-phenomenological consumerism, in which stimulation of the part of the brain essential to our decision making processes is influenced in order to produce a new form of desiring subject. These and other elements of our contemporary information society, have a significant effect on the way our brain works by bypassing the distributions of sensibility that organize our sensorial world - in the end producing a super supple, normalized and excitable subject in whom resistance is unfeasible and discontent and occupation movements impossible to conceive."
Warren Neidich
Warren Neidich works in Berlin and Los Angeles. He recently had a one-person exhibition at Gallery Fons Welters, Amsterdam. Other exhibitions in the Netherlands include Stedelijk Museum Hertogenbosch and Onomatopee in Eindhoven. Internationally his work has been exhibited at PS1-MOMA, The Whitney Museum of American Art, LACMA in Los Angeles, the ICA in London, The Ludwig Museum in Cologne and MuKHA in Antwerp. He was former tutor at Goldsmiths College, London and presently visiting research fellow at the Delft School of Design, TU Delft School of Architecture.