This is a special blackout edition! — KADIST — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 11 → December 16, 2012

An exhibition with works drawn from the Kadist collection, co-curated with Rossella Biscotti. With : Dora Garcia, Alberto Grifi, Joachim Koester, Jiří Kovanda, Joris Lacoste, Jonathan Monk, Melvin Moti, Akram Zaatari.

In collaboration with: Tarek Atoui, Nanni Balestrini, Louis Lüthi.

This is a special blackout edition! was conceived in collaboration with the artist Rossella Biscotti in relation to the research on the notion of ‘blackout ‘, conducted during her residency at Kadist. Her enquiry in Paris started by looking into the city’s electricity and communication network, while she traced historical references of major power failures such as the New York blackout of 1977.

In a broader sense, the meaning of ‘blackout’ —primarily an electrical failure or momentary interruption, opens up to new organizations, perceptions and different ways of experiencing time and space. Every person caught in a blackout must redefine the potentiality of public space, relate to strangers and invent new temporary forms of organization.

A blackout acts as the breaking point of an established order, on a personal level as a loss of consciousness or on a collective level, as the temporary disruption of political institutions for example.

Inspired by Blackout, a poem written by Nanni Balestrini¹, and his use of the cut-up technique, the exhibition explores the motion preceding a blackout, consisting of a sequence of accelerations and saturations until reaching a breakdown point.

Here, the works from the collection give shape to Rossella Biscotti’s interest for the polysemy of the term ‘blackout’. Along with documentary sources, the exhibition will evolve at the pace of the research, with different encounters and film screenings.

¹ Nanni Balestrini is a writer and artist who took part in the Neoavanguardia, Italian movement of the 1960s. He was one of the founder of Potere Operaio and supporter of Autonomia Operaia’(Workers Autonomy), a revolutionary movement that in 1979 was accused of subversive association and armed insurrection against the powers of the State.
Rossella Biscotti’s most recent piece, “The Trial” (2010 — 2012), is composed by the audio recordings obtained from the “April 7th” trial against Autonomia Operaia and by an installation made from casts of the Aula bunker, a high-security courtroom in Rome. This work was part of the last dOCUMENTA (13).