EXPERIMENTAL SETUP

Curator: Anna Fliri

The manifestation of the TOTAL INSTALLATION and a sensual, poetic, radical and crude demonstration of art

“We detect in contemporary art a pathological over-theorisation, which has largely superseded a poetic, sensual and haptic experiencing of art.”

The EXPERIMENTAL SETUP collective abandons the conventional operating system of contemporary art and its exhibition practice by the introduction of the total installation. The theoretical mooring for this purpose is the Manifest of the Total Installation, which presents a new aesthetic programme and exhibition concept.

The message of the Manifest of the Total Installation is directed both at protagonists of the art world and exhibition visitors:
The habitual and established structures and procedures of the presentation of art, the institutional valuation parameters, the mechanisms of the art market, and the appropriation models of the art observer, having degenerated into a ritual, have to be rethought in favour of a sensual, poetic, radical and crude demonstration of art! In this context, the total installation is understood as a paradigm in the artistic work of EXPERIMENTAL SETUP.

The total installation is radical and crude:
The wont exhibition presentation is overwritten and its corresponding organisational processes, such as installation and dismantling, opening, day-to-day exhibition business, and closing, are restructured. The total installation should be understood as an open narrative, which manifests and updates itself in exhibitions. Through the dramatisation of the exhibition presentation, a dismantling of the passive role of the exhibition visitor happens in favour of the latter’s empowerment into an effective and active protagonist. The standardised and ossified distribution of roles, between actor and observer, producer and consumer, is done away with. The white cube, as the symbol of the contemporary art room, is questioned in its sterility and, by way of the total installation, subjected to a hyper-metamorphosis. Questions like: What is (still) part of the exhibition? Who is visitor, who actor? And is the exhibition already open or already being set up?, cannot be clearly answered.

The total installation is sensual and poetic:
The artistic works from various media, assembled in the total installation, are ambassadors of the myth stored away in our collective subconscious and in our archaic knowledge. Pictures, objects, apparatuses, films, smells and soundtracks are arranged into experimental setups, dealing with love, hate, desire, pain, betrayal, greed, revenge and pleasure. The myth records the archetypal human contradictions and conflicts, passions and transgressions in a language of imagination and thus lays a trail back to the oldest narratives of humankind. Evoking reminiscences of the Renaissance cabinets of curiosities, observers find themselves caught in a classification system that interprets the cosmos as a network of relations in which everything is related.

EXPERIMENTAL SETUP
collective was founded in October 2018 and so far has realised the two exhibitions DIE PRAXIS DER UNMÖGLICHKEIT* and IM RAUSCH DES UNTERGANGS**. At Kunstraum Innsbruck, from May 18th to June 22nd, 2019, it will present the first part of a cycle dedicated to the subject of the myth.
EXPERIMENTAL SETUP is made up of Kata Hinterlechner and Bosko Gastager, as well as artists and actors engaged for every upcoming exhibition project respectively.

experimentalsetup.com

* Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen/Tiroler Künstlerschaft/kuenstlerschaft.at
** Die Bäckerei/Premierentage 2018/premierentage.at