Joa Ljungberg + Edi Muka, Curators of the Göteborg Biennial, Rethink Dissent

“Dis­sent” can be described as a sen­ti­ment or phi­los­o­phy of non-agreement or oppo­si­tion to an idea (e.g., a government’s poli­cies) or an entity (e.g. a reli­gious com­mu­nity or polit­i­cal party). Antonyms include assent, agree­ment and accep­tance. “Dis­sent” may in some polit­i­cal sys­tems be for­mally expressed through oppo­si­tion pol­i­tics, while polit­i­cally repres­sive regimes may pro­hibit any form of dis­sent. Indi­vid­u­als who do not con­form to or sup­port the poli­cies of cer­tain states may be described as “dis­si­dents” or in extreme cases, “ene­mies of the state.” [1]

With the fourth edi­tion of Göte­borg Inter­na­tional Bien­nial for Con­tem­po­rary Art, we want to resume the impor­tant dis­cus­sions about “the con­di­tion of the polit­i­cal” that formed the basis for “Democ­racy Unre­al­ized” of Doc­u­menta XI in 2002. Where do we stand today, five years later? “Rethink­ing Dis­sent” is meant to encour­age reflec­tion on the mean­ing of dis­sent in a time char­ac­ter­ized by the dom­i­nance of global cap­i­tal­ism that oper­ates on a level above pol­i­tics. It is a “scoundrel time” accord­ing to the philoso­pher and soci­ol­o­gist Slavoj Zizek—a time when even the polit­i­cal left has adjusted to the func­tion of a glob­al­ized mar­ket econ­omy and has ceased to offer any real polit­i­cal alternative.

In the essay enti­tled “Thanks—for Noth­ing!” Jodi Dean, an author and pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence, dis­cusses this sup­posed polit­i­cal impasse and rhetor­i­cally asks if “per­haps the most pathetic attribute of the Left today is its vig­or­ous defence of the Right’s most spe­cial trea­sure, lib­eral democ­racy?” [2].

Accord­ing to Dean there is no great dif­fer­ence between Zizek’s under­stand­ing of the “post-political total­ity of global cap­i­tal” and the con­cep­tion of empire [3] of the philoso­phers Michael Hardt and Anto­nio Negri: both regard glob­al­iza­tion as threat­en­ing the polit­i­cal space. But whereas Hardt and Negri see the loss of the “auton­omy of the polit­i­cal” as an oppor­tu­nity inso­far as it pro­vides an unfore­seen pos­si­bil­ity for a mul­ti­tude of strug­gles and orga­ni­za­tions to glob­ally organ­ise them­selves against the supra­na­tional power struc­ture, Zizek sees the same phe­nom­e­non as “pre­cisely that depoli­ti­za­tion that fore­closes any real, polit­i­cal chal­lenge to glob­al­iza­tion.” [4]

Account­ing for Zizek’s con­cep­tion of today’s Left as sadly engaged in a never-ending process of resis­tance that could never seri­ously chal­lenge the exist­ing order (as it is part of it), Dean con­tin­ues by explain­ing how today nation­al­ism and reli­gious and eth­nic fun­da­men­tal­ism not only feed on the fears trig­gered by the increased close­ness to the Other (brought on by glob­al­iza­tion), but also con­sti­tute temp­ta­tions in a long­ing to “fill in” this absence of polit­i­cal alter­na­tives and visions. [5]

Another char­ac­ter­is­tic of this “post-political” time we are sup­pos­edly liv­ing in is the extent to which our lives and our under­stand­ing of the world are affected by a con­tin­u­ous state of war—a war that is widely pre­sented and explained to us as a clash between tra­di­tion­al­ist Islamic fun­da­men­tal­ism and mod­ern lib­eral democ­racy. Is this sup­posed ide­o­log­i­cal antag­o­nism real? If not, what is this global war really about?

Two months after the attacks on World Trade Cen­ter, Pres­i­dent George W. Bush put his sig­na­ture to the Patriot Act, enact­ing leg­is­la­tion that dra­mat­i­cally expanded the author­ity of U.S. law enforce­ment agen­cies for the stated pur­pose of fight­ing ter­ror­ism in the United States and abroad. The act autho­rized, for exam­ple, the indef­i­nite deten­tion of non-citizens sus­pected of ter­ror­ist activ­i­ties and their sub­se­quent tri­als by a mil­i­tary com­mis­sion. In State of Excep­tion, Gior­gio Agam­ben uses such cir­cum­stances to describe how our notion of democ­racy rests on the fic­tion that he who sus­pends the law still stands in rela­tion to the law. This exten­sion of power—or “state of exception”—is a phe­nom­e­non that accord­ing to Agam­ben has been exam­ined quite lit­tle, but that nev­er­the­less offers a pow­er­ful strat­egy with the poten­tial to trans­form democ­ra­cies into total­i­tar­ian states. By indi­cat­ing how today “states of excep­tion” have become norm, Agam­ben chal­lenges our con­fi­dence in democ­racy, high­light­ing that it is pre­cisely here that the bor­der between democ­racy and tyranny becomes blurred. [6]

In Haruki Murakami’s novel Hard-Boiled Won­der­land and the End of the World, the reader is pre­sented with an imag­i­nary but real­is­tic place: a per­fectly walled city. The con­di­tion of exis­tence within this wall is described in the words of the Gate­keeper at the begin­ning of the book: “You have to endure. If you endure, every­thing will be fine. No worry, no suf­fer­ing. It all disappears…this is the End of the World.”

Murakami’s ver­sion of the end of the world is not an apoc­a­lyp­tic one. It is rather a self-constructed and self-centered state that it is impos­si­ble to escape from. Here an induced perfection—an extended, per­ma­nent state—comes at the high price of depart­ing from one’s mind, mem­o­ries, and oppo­sites and oppo­si­tions like love and hatred, hope and disillusion.

How then are we to con­sider the real­ity of our time? Is the walled city in Murakami’s book a metaphor for our con­tem­po­rary con­di­tion, or does our con­di­tion serve as a metaphor for Murakami’s enclosed uni­verse? What are the tools that can help us under­stand and dis­tin­guish what comes first and what is what? We believe that it is here that the artists’ works come into play.

In Armando Lulaj’s film Liv­ing in Mem­ory, a five-pointed star burns on a hill­top in Tirana. The burn­ing star stands as a memo­r­ial for a once-revered sym­bol of the strug­gle for an equal soci­ety that later became syn­ony­mous with sup­pres­sion and per­se­cu­tion. There is a rit­u­al­is­tic feel­ing to the piece, as if the artist were attempt­ing to purify the sym­bol from its vio­lent his­tory through the act of burning.

The glit­ter of fire against the dark sky and the star’s short, pre­de­ter­mined life-span func­tions equally well as sym­bol of the “wanna be a STAR” cul­ture that thrives through today’s medi­ated soci­ety. The piece is not some kind of homage to either though. Soon it falls to the ground and the fire devours it com­pletely, leav­ing behind only the ashes—physical ashes of fire, sym­bolic ashes of fail­ure, and liv­ing ashes of the mem­ory of old power struc­tures replaced by new ones.

At the heart of The Stroll of the New Man by Tania Bruguera is the trans­for­ma­tion of the Cuban regime from solid roots in “pure com­mu­nist and egal­i­tar­ian ide­ol­ogy” into a sys­tem try­ing to sur­vive at any cost in the face of global cap­i­tal­ism. Bruguera used her priv­i­leged posi­tion as an inter­na­tional artist to invite two less priv­i­leged Cubans who have never trav­eled abroad before to Göte­borg. The artist states in her project descrip­tion that The Stroll of the New Man reveals the real­ity of this the­o­ret­i­cal egal­i­tar­ian soci­ety as one that is actu­ally gov­erned by privileges.

To travel is an exam­ple of such a priv­i­lege and artists are priv­i­leged as they serve as evi­dence of the “cul­tural and intel­lec­tual devel­op­ment achieved by the Cuban soci­ety.” Con­tem­po­rary Cuba is accord­ing to the artist per­vaded by the dis­crep­ancy between ide­ol­ogy and its imple­men­ta­tions in daily life. This dis­crep­ancy has a destruc­tive impact on the spir­i­tual and ide­o­log­i­cal con­di­tion of the Cuban sub­jects and “dooms to fail­ure the Utopia pro­moted by the rev­o­lu­tion.” The idea of the “new man,” as char­ac­terised by a strong and rec­i­p­ro­cal com­mit­ment to soci­ety, has been pushed aside, favor­ing instead the indi­vid­ual and his indi­vid­ual projects. [7]

If a coun­try resists the temp­ta­tions of global cap­i­tal­ism in order to safe­guard an egal­i­tar­ian soci­ety that is in real­ity hier­ar­chi­cal, do we have any choice but to accept the fail­ure of the great egal­i­tar­ian project that has already, and so spec­tac­u­larly, dis­in­te­grated in East­ern Europe? Are we left to accept that there are no fur­ther alternatives?

Fail­ure as phe­nom­e­non is cen­tral also in Fia-Stina Sandlund’s piece An Ide­al­is­tic Attempt that she con­structed as an inter­view with her­self. We hear her ask to what extent she is pre­pared to take risks for the sake of “ideals.” Her scrutiny cir­cles around an action she was plan­ning with Ulla Røder, a Dan­ish peace activist. They directed their action against the busi­ness­man Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller who, accord­ing to Sand­lund and Røder, is involved in shady busi­nesses with con­tacts high up in the Dan­ish gov­ern­ment and royal fam­ily. Sand­lund thinks twice before going ahead in a pre­car­i­ous moment. Nev­er­the­less, the effects of their plan-making impedes their sec­ond thoughts. Dan­ish police and mil­i­tary watch Røder increas­ingly. Closer to the date planed for the action, she dis­ap­pears, and Sand­lund is in prison.

The sec­ond piece, as the title sug­gests, is a con­tin­u­a­tion of “putting to life” of failed action. Røder is not present in per­son but instead through the lyrics of Verdi’s Opera Neb­uchad­nez­zar, which she has labo­ri­ously revised into a polit­i­cal state­ment. The per­son tar­geted against has invested cap­i­tal in the Dan­ish opera house and the action was there­fore suit­ably planned as an oper­atic act. In the recon­struc­tion we see a group of opera singers, wrapped in blood­stained ban­dages, singing Røder’s lyrics from the plat­form of a truck. All the time con­scious that this is only a stag­ing of the failed action, the artist acts it out accord­ingly. Address­ing the same issues and the same per­son as the project did at con­cep­tion, Røder refers, too, to the Great Absent in the part with her deter­mi­na­tion, con­vic­tion, and ideals.

Refer­ring to his prac­tice, Thomas Hirschhorn says: “I want to work in chaos for it is the only pos­si­ble way to resist. It con­sti­tutes a Resis­tance to Facts, to Infor­ma­tion, to Opin­ion. Art itself is a means of Resis­tance and it does resist because it is Art. That is what is essen­tial. But that is also what is dif­fi­cult for an Artist: to keep believ­ing in Art’s con­sti­tu­tive resis­tance and not to turn to archi­tec­ture, design, graph­ics or fash­ion.” [8]

When enter­ing Hirschhorn’s Con­cre­tion Re, the piece imme­di­ately swal­lows you. Per­cep­tive abil­i­ties melt down while a feel­ing of hav­ing entered some sur­real, fiction-like world takes over. How­ever alien at first glance, the place appears more and more famil­iar with every step we take. This at the same time as it grows more and more unspeak­able. Con­cre­tion Re con­sists of a seem­ingly chaotic mess that forces upon the viewer the hor­rors of today’s Iraq and the phys­i­cal real­ity of war, but also the wide­spread objec­ti­fi­ca­tion of our bod­ies, exem­pli­fied through pornog­ra­phy and body-fixated adver­tis­ing and con­sump­tion. With every grue­some detail paraded in front of our eyes, our uneasi­ness grows together with a sense of fear. This is not so much a fear of the cru­elty illus­trated by the images, as one that springs from the real­iza­tion of the extent to which we have become mere pas­sive con­sumers of images that are fed to us inces­santly by the mass media in a mix­ture of hor­ror and beauty. Con­cre­tion Re aims pre­cisely at this pas­siv­ity and at our non-involvement while com­pelling our sense of com­mon respon­si­bil­ity. The piece is so over­whelm­ing and so strong that it is impos­si­ble to escape it.

The young and beau­ti­ful war­riors of AES + F invokes per­plex­ity. As a viewer, one strug­gles to iden­tify one’s feel­ings when faced with these gra­cious but dan­ger­ous, god-like but still human, and poten­tially fero­cious but calmly idyl­lic beings. Should one feel fright­ened or threat­ened? Are we allowed to be seduced, or should we feel dis­quiet? As crea­tures of the future, com­ing straight out of our col­lec­tive imag­i­nary, the AHL war­riors face us in Olympian calm­ness. Their pure­ness and phys­i­cal per­fec­tion shines from them, cre­at­ing the nec­es­sary dis­tance for ven­er­a­tion that is enhanced fur­ther by the glim­mer and shine of the pol­ished bronze. Why are they here? What is their pres­ence intended to remind us of? Are they here to attack us or to pro­tect us? But from whom? Maybe from ourselves!

A bit fur­ther ahead in the same exhi­bi­tion hall we hear the soft and inse­cure voice of a lit­tle girl mum­bling words in a lan­guage she doesn’t under­stand. In his work Com­mon Vocab­u­lar­ies Adel Abidin has under­taken the task of teach­ing the girl (and us) her native lan­guage, Ara­bic. But he only teaches her words that have become syn­ony­mous with the medi­ated image of today’s Iraq. “Bomb,” “Abduc­tion,” “Thief,” “Explosion”…these and other words soon echo in our heads through the girl’s tedious attempts to repeat the words with the cor­rect pro­nun­ci­a­tion. The pile of papers on the floor lists all the words in both Eng­lish and Ara­bic, thus offer­ing a link between the lit­tle girl on the screen and us as viewers.

In the biennial’s largest exhi­bi­tion hall, Jenny Holzer projects her piece You Won’t Believe This! Holzer built the work out of recently declas­si­fied United States gov­ern­ment doc­u­ments released under the Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act. The doc­u­ments reveal the bureau­cratic face of the war against ter­ror­ism. Their pub­lic pre­sen­ta­tion high­lights the com­plex ten­sion between secrecy and trans­parency.  Para­dox­i­cally the piece is per­vaded by a remark­ably strong human pres­ence. A pres­ence felt through the traces of the hands that wrote the doc­u­ments and through the traces of the hands that at a later stage tediously erased words, sen­tences and not infre­quently full para­graphs, when the con­tent was con­sid­ered too sen­si­tive to be made pub­lic. It is a pres­ence that is felt fur­ther through the voices describ­ing the most inhu­man behav­iour, and in defen­sive but help­less attempts to appear “human” in the midst of this inhumanity.

Holzer’s pro­jec­tion over­looks the instal­la­tion Security/Säkerhet by Jane Alexan­der. A dou­ble barbed wire fence encloses a strange crea­ture, half-human, half-bird. The crea­ture stands on a rec­tan­gle where wheat grows and dies. Around it lay gloves, sick­les, and machetes, long the tra­di­tional emblems of the farm worker but now asso­ci­ated with pol­i­tics, rev­o­lu­tion, and con­flict. The pres­ence of uni­formed guards out­side the fence adds to the con­fu­sion about the creature’s sta­tus and blurs the bor­ders between pro­tec­tion and impris­on­ment. Is it we that are sup­posed to be pro­tected from the crea­ture, or is the crea­ture sup­posed to be pro­tected from us? Even if Security/Säkerhet refers to post-apartheid South Africa, its state of limbo func­tions equally well as a metaphor for a time in which “The Great Promise,” tear­ing down one sym­bol­i­cal and phys­i­cal Wall, has been replaced by a myr­iad of new and far more sophis­ti­cated walls and fences.

Toward the very end of Haruki Murakami’s novel, the pro­tag­o­nist is pre­sented with the chance to escape the walled city. At the moment in which he and his shadow—representing his mind—are about to leave, he sud­denly decides to stay. In part­ing with his shadow he says: “I must see out the con­se­quences of my own doings. This is my world. The Wall is here to hold me in, the River flows through me, the smoke is me burn­ing. I must know why.”

Rather than pas­sively accept the end of the world as an ulti­mate state where change is unthink­able, it is our hope that “Rethink­ing Dis­sent” will encour­age reflec­tion on dif­fer­ent aspects of this “uni­verse inside the walls” that many of us have col­lec­tively assented to. Artists from many dif­fer­ent parts of the world help us visu­al­ize and con­cretize the uni­verse within the walls while ques­tion­ing the terms on which it exists. Strong aes­thetic, process-based expres­sions with will lead us on a jour­ney trac­ing men­tal routes, always requir­ing our active par­tic­i­pa­tion and inner involvement.

______
FOOTNOTES

[1] Mer­riam Webster’s Online Dic­tio­nary, http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=dissent, 2007-07-05; Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissent, 2007-06-18; The Amer­i­can Her­itage® Dic­tio­nary of the Eng­lish Lan­guage, http://www.bartleby.com/61/76/D0287600.html, 2007-07-05.
[2] Dean, J. 2007 “Thanks—for Noth­ing!” In the cat­a­logue of Göte­borg Inter­na­tional Bien­nial for Con­tem­po­rary Art, part 2, Erlan­ders tryck­eri Göte­borg 2007.
[3] Michael Hardt’s and Anto­nio Negri’s Empire describes our global order as char­ac­ter­ized by the nation-state los­ing its posi­tion of sov­er­eign author­ity to a supra­na­tional power struc­ture that they name Empire. The name Empire refers to the ancient Roman Empire that com­bined monar­chy, aris­toc­racy, and democ­racy to a sin­gle sov­er­eign rule. The monar­chy of today’s empire is, accord­ing to Hardt and Negri, the Pen­ta­gon, as well supra­na­tional eco­nom­i­cal insti­tu­tions such as WTO, The World Bank, and the IMF, while its aris­toc­racy is shaped by a few dom­i­nant nation stated and major transna­tional coop­er­a­tions. See Hardt, N. & Negri, A. 2000, Empire, Har­vard Uni­ver­sity Press, 2000.
[4] Dean, J. 2005 “Zizek against Democ­racy”, posted at: http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/files/zizek_against_democracy_new_version.doc, 2007-06-26
[5] Dean, J. 2007.
[6] Agam­ben, G. 2003 Stato di eccezione, trans­lated into Swedish by Sven-Olov Wal­len­stein, Undan­tagstill­stån­det, Site Edi­tions, 2005.
[7] Bruguera, T. 2007 project descrip­tion for “The Stroll of the New Man,” in the cat­a­logue of Göte­borg Inter­na­tional Bien­nial for Con­tem­po­rary Art, part 2, Erlan­ders tryck­eri Göte­borg 2007.
[8] Hirschhorn, T. 2007, artist’s state­ment for the work Con­cre­tion Re, in the cat­a­logue of Göte­borg Inter­na­tional Bien­nial for Con­tem­po­rary Art, part 2, Erlan­ders tryck­eri Göte­borg 2007.