The Start and Finish exhibition reflects on the project-based economy of contemporary culture in which institutions and cultural producers work from project to project and on different projects at the same time. As argued by theorists Bojana Kunst and Boris Groys, the project is a highly contradictory model of contemporary production. While it opens up multiple possibilities, they become closed due to the inevitability of deadlines. There is actually no full accomplishment, just a continuous starting anew in different formats. Working on a project means surrendering the present to the promise of the future, living in a parallel time, disconnected from the temporality and communal practice of daily life. Project-based work is often connected to self-realisation, and as such, there is no demarcation line between work and life. The seeming success of the project happens at the expense of free flow creativity, in-depth research, persistence in time and space, private life and social relations.

Participants:
Dominika Belanská & Mads Floor Andersen, Claudiu Cobilanschi, Lucia Gavulová, Jana Kapelová, Mira Keratová, kpD (kleines postfordistisches Drama / small postfordist Drama – Brigitta Kuster, Isabell Lorey, Marion von Osten, Katja Reichard), Jaroslav Kyša, Petr Mezihorák, Adam Novota, Kristína Országhová, Zuzana Révészová, Péter Szabó & Teri Szűcs, Jeff Warren & Caroline Woolard and others

Concept:
Judit Angel

Team:
Judit Angel, Petra Balíková, Eliška Mazalanová

Exhibition architecture:
Michael Hieslmair & Michael Zinganel

Opening:
April 5, 2018 at 7 pm

The aim of the exhibition is to offer an expanded framework for examining the conditions and context of today’s artistic production as well as the functioning and role of art institutions. In terms of tranzit.sk’s programme, it means an interval of concentration, research, sharing of knowledge and experience with others on a regular basis. The proposed themes for reflection are:

• The relevance of “New Institutionalism”, a trend which aimed at reforming art institutions from within in the mid 1990s to mid 2000’s in the context of the decline of the welfare state;
• The relation between art and the neoliberal economy, between art and work, precarity and precarization with a view of the Slovak art scene and international examples;
• The potential of collective platforms and commoning in developing new modes of production and socializing, the ways in which art and art institutions can play a role in this process.

During the exhibition tranzit.sk’s space will become a studio that combines display and library functions, the presentation of artworks and knowledge production manifest in research, reading groups, public discussions, community events. The original division between exhibition and administrative areas will be replaced by a spatial mixture of learning and socialising possibilities.

Despite the fact that Start and Finish is also a project, we assume that its collective and open-ended character will provide us, the participants and the audience, if not with an end-result, at least a set of new views, knowledge and tools which will make it easier for us to go further.