exhibition:

National Pride

27 Nis 2007
10 Haz 2007

National pride reconsiders the issue of origin in global society and its effect on contemporary artist practice.

This project is a subjective survey into a recently revived social tendency that starts rather at home than on a global or universal level. This social tendency is popularly associated with either a regressive nationalism or the anti-globalization movement but is rarely considered in depth within the contemporary art discourse.

The problem of dealing with national myths is one of the ever-present issues in the reading of artist practice. Yet most artists consider their own nationality as if it were a strange family with a slow blood renewal into which they have been forced. Their work is often their way out of a national straitjacket into a promise of a borderless world.

The world has indeed moved from the concept of singular national identity towards the promise of global and multinational inter-exchangeability but many people, artists included, feel trapped inside of an ambiguous in-between zone. That in-between zone is an undefined place where unresolved echoes of the past are crushing against unfulfilled promises of the future. 'Not getting quite there' becomes a certain state of mind which artists often cherish as a true sign of freedom being content with not belonging to a single national art world but to one globalized, mega art world. This state of mind, however, can be even good for art or even economically lucrative for artists within neo-liberal, profit-based ideology.

The new ideological frame in which they find themselves, levels down all differences while avoiding dialectics connected to a particular and specific social contex. It's an indirect negation of artist's primal habitat. Should artists perhaps go back home and reconsider it? Or has the original home perhaps become an outdated category which no longer fits into the contemporary art discourse?