mit Joey Holder, Lukas Janitsch, Olesya Kleymenova, Elena Kristofor, Paul Purgas, Stephen Oram, Ernst Miesgang
kuratiert von Laura Prime
Austrian Cultural Forum, London
2017
We’re only human. We are captured by stories both as explanation and intrigue: We understand and grow through narratives. It only takes one seed from someone with the power, the platform and the voice, to begin the contagion in the collective-social-imaginary.
We’re only human and we love to conspire, to gossip; we form strong social bonds through this kind of exchange. We also want to be able to attribute blame for our faults and problems. We want a scapegoat, a direction for our finger-pointing. We respond very effectively to fear and scaremongering. The mob is easily persuaded of its target and much harder to pacify.
We excuse ourselves for our flaws – we’re only human after all. We make bad choices because we ‘don’t know any better’. We have begun to put our faith into huge unknowns, taking unquantifiable risks on ‘wild cards’ rather than ‘play it safe’ because of fear. Mass-hive-hysteria. We lose ourselves to the fictions we’re told and give in to conspiracy, to belief in the alien. It’s easier to blame the ‘other’ than to take responsibility for our actions.
Only Human performs a fiction, a deception, using science fiction as a tool to make the familiar strange – to reflect on our speed to give in to conspiracy. Each work becomes a recovered item previously hidden from the public: An artefact of the alien.
Link zu Austrian Cultural Forum London