Containera

European mobility and Materialized Information Transfer in the Post-Internet Era

Praha – Containall      Bratislava – Hotdock     Varšava – Lookout Gallery      Budapešť – Fiatal Képzőművészek Stúdiója Egyesület    Berlín – Zwitschermaschine    Curych – Soon    Řím – Label201     Vídeň – Boxircus

         

 

How do young European artists reflect the cultural heritage of their homeland? To what extent does the place of installation shape the perception of a work of art? And to what extent is it possible to withdraw the modifying factors that emerge in the process of transporting and reinstalling the art?

Travelling exhibition project Contain[era] aims at scrutinizing the relation of art and the context of its exposure. The ambition is to materialize the mode of information sharing which we became entirely accustomed to in the post-internet era: transferring the information with no fundamental shifts of the meaning in the course of the transferring process.

Eight young artists from eight European countries will be introduced independently in a group of eight large shipping containers turned into mobile galleries. These unique exhibition spaces will be travelling on the route connecting eight partnering countries – Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Italy.

The mobile galleries will represent closed-up information capsules, synecdochically symbolizing the artistic perspective of the countries involved and transferring the message untouched across the participating cities in weekly cycles, in the summer of 2015. The artists will be chosen based on the topic of their work, focusing on the notions of information sharing and multimediality, with emphasis on reflection of the specifics of their national culture.

After finishing the cycle and visiting all destinations, the eight containers will meet in the organizing city of Prague: this unique moment of reunion will provide space for discussion and contemplation on the results of the project. In addition, the presented artists will create a ninth container, an international collective work of art.

The project will take a different run in its second stage, in winter – the artists will be presented again in one of the partnering cities, but this time in the institutionalized context of an art gallery. The expositions, sealed in the capsules, will be finally reinstalled – a breaking moment in which the original hypothesis will be challenged, studied and further discussed.

The whole project will be virtually mirrored on an independent web portal, cumulating various coverage: videos, photos, interviews with artists and theoreticians, reviews, discussions.

The results of the project will be summarized in an extensive catalogue containing reviews of the particular exhibitions and of the project as a whole, various essays, interviews, and detailed photo and video documentation. The observations gathered will render a new layer of understanding and perceiving the phenomenon of information sharing, an essential notion of the post-internet era.