Common Space: Gallery

Welcome to Common Space. 

 

 You were already here. 

Common Space: Gallery called into being new venues for contemporary art in Prague.
Although Prague is well served by small and medium sized exhibition spaces, the Common Space Gallery played a different and complementary, although critical, role to the existing spaces.

Common Space: Gallery engaged people who were not involved in the contemporary art scene, while maintaining a standard and focus that appealed to ‘insiders’. We aimed to allow ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ to interact, blurring the boundaries that separated these groups. As well as promoting access to contemporary art in unintimidating settings, we sought to call into being new critical publics for the Prague art scene, prompting new critical reflections and helping to make more fertile ground for new ideas.

This implicit interrogation of the current arrangements and relations of art production and experience, formed part of a wider project of critical engagement with theworld more generally in collaboration with Everything is Political: Prague Political Discussion Space & The Prague Philosophy Club.

Three major exhibitions where constituted within the Common Space: Gallery, which led to us being featured in Flash Art Magazine and being highlighted amongst Provokator Magazines STDS (Stuff that doesn't suck).

Ex1 - Double Game Squared
Ex2 - I would be happier if I let everything be true at once
Ex3 - What I never had is being torn from me. What I did not live, I will miss forever.

Explore these spaces using the guides contained in the relevant postings. Ex3 Postings remain a work in progress, as does 'Common People'.















Participate.    Engage.   Transgress.

Invite yourself into Common Space.

Common Space in Time: The Presence of Absence

"When we remember, we are thinking of something that is not here..."
Sigmund Freud

It was approximately one year ago, in the summer of 2008, that the first action to be constituted under the name Common Space took place. In short (dis)order this flowed naturally into the events that took place under the auspice of Common Space: Gallery and Fakulta Solisarnosc.

CS:G curled three times around different houses and fell asleep. It has lain, dormant if not entirely at ease, since the last Prague event in the last days of last November.

Now, with various configurations of dust swept, settled, scattered or scorned, it seems appropriate to enact a rite of mourning for what was and to issue a call to arms for what can be. The social voodoo that has permeated this project means that it seems entirely possible, if not required, to both kill off the dead and summon new life with this one act.



And so I address you; to provoke new constellations in Common Spaces.

Common Spaces

spaces of


being, not having



identity, not category



interaction, not interface



uncertainty, not risk



solidarity, not atomisation



challenge, not contentment



transgression, not control



a-fear, not security

Ex1 Curatorial Text

“Her work was too nutty for that, too idiosyncratic, too personal to be thought of as belonging to any medium or discipline.”

In his novel Leviathan, Paul Auster introduces a character called Maria, based on the French artist Sophie Calle. However, in describing Maria’s rituals, projects and events that happen to her, Auster ‘mingles fact with fiction’. Included in the fundament of Maria’s character are two pieces (Wardrobe/ The Tie and Striptease/ The Blonde Wig) taken from one of Calle’s earlier projects – Autobiographical Stories.

The text from ‘Autobiographical Stories’, read by the artist, can be heard in the background. Each story explains the significance of a particular object in Calle’s life.

Objects similar to these are displayed here and are accompanied not only by Calle’s stories in audio format, but also by the stories on pages 2 and 3 (see post- Ex1 Traces: Stories & Objects) detailing an aspect of our relation to the actual objects on display. The varied nature of these stories which are often seemingly banal, but are also both true and personal, is juxtaposed with the highly amusing and occasionally outlandish nature of the stories told by Calle.

Are Calle’s stories truly autobiographical or are they actually an accentuated, exaggerated version of reality? A reality filtered through the lens of the highly stylized rules and rituals that characterize Calle’s work, in order to create an imaginary and perfected autobiography.

As Calle herself notes, the stories, along with other works in her oeuvre blur the boundaries between reality and imagination. Calle ends up believing the love letter that she receives from the writer she paid to write it, much as she is very much enamoured by the consistent attention paid to her by the private detective she hired to follow her around Paris in an earlier work.

These works highlight a commonplace [neurotic] response to the unsicherheit (unsafety & insecurity) of contemporary life: creating false rules, false securities and invented realities as coping mechanisms. Responding to a sense of disorientation and isolation, Calle’s works call into question the boundaries between public and private and examine issues of identity and intimacy.

The relation between the private, the public and the common, as well as the relevance of conventions and norms in the atomized world are highlighted. The stories presented in this exhibition add to this mix the element of willful transgression. They present varying degrees of personal information, without falling into mawkish confessional. They are small histories that combine to make a living archeology. They are answers that provoke questions.

This opening up creates vulnerability, which in contemporary societies is often a precursor for exploitation. However in the climate of unfear that pervades the truly common space, this vulnerability is transformed into a virtue. In the common space, voyeurism and invasion are inverted: they become an invitation, a platform for mutuality and engagement. Engage in recovering your identity from the unmediated arbitrariness that our own conceit and world making can leave us at the mercy of.

Invite yourself into the common space

Ex2 Traces: Pictures, Prose & Poetry

New works by New Orleans artist and poet Elizabeth Gross examine our interactions, laying bare the contradictions in our perception and understanding of ourselves and others, while holding out the possibility of welcoming this uncertain mode of being.

The works circle the tension between the liberating and confining aspects of allowing multiple, sometimes contradictory truths to be held together in the same thought.






“It is necessary not to be ‘myself,’ still less to be ‘ourselves.’”
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

The part of me that lives in my body does not know the meaning of the word forget.

The part of me that does not live in my body does not want to.

There is no part of me that does not live in my body. 

Elizabeth Gross, Room for Questions

Furthermore, transposition is a criterion of truth. A truth which cannot be transposed isn’t a truth; in the same way that what doesn’t change in appearance according to the point of view isn’t a real object, but a deceptive representation of such. In the mind, too, there is three-dimensional space. Simone Weil




















The city gives one the feeling of being at home.
We must take the feeling of being at home into exile.
We must be rooted in the absence of a place.
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace






The art of transposing truths is one of the most essential and the least known. What makes it difficult is that, in order to practice it, one has to have placed oneself at the center of a truth and possessed it in all its nakedness, behind the particular form in which it happens to have found expression.
Simone Weil, The Need for Roots

Ex2 Curatorial Text

Elizabeth Gross re-interprets and elevates traditional crafts and found objects through the use of a deceptively simple narrative in order to pose us a question masquerading as a statement. Gross asks us to consider the implications of allowing multiple, often contradictory truths to be held together in the same thought.

Moving in the realms of paradoxical uncertainty created by the action of another person on a third party, Gross faces the contradictions and unknowing that underpin our interactions. Is this to be viewed negatively or should we in fact welcome the possibilities it brings and embrace a Keatsian mode of negative capability - an antidote to narrow and ultimately futile truth quests and grasping for over-simplifying explanatory frameworks? The tension at the heart of the work lies in the conflict between the potentially emancipating effects of this Hyper-Janusianism and the possibility that this could in fact be a new trap, further removed from reality and more difficult to escape from.

The centrality of language to our contemporary concepts of truth, through the pragmatic acceptance or rejection of language games and their rules, necessitates that we can identify speakers, addressees and the things which are spoken about. We should also be able to differentiate between the types of statements that are made: those that merely describe a particular circumstance; those that create a situation through their own performative value; and those which are in fact commands or instructions.

Gross toys with these theoretical notions, obfuscating the speaker and addressee, mirroring our lived experience where none of these elements come with identifying labels or tags. If we are unable to determine how and when we are being commanded or when we are enacting change through our speech, then how can we be sure of our own agency? Letting everything be true at once has implications for our integrity as the authors of our own destiny or at least our self-image as such.

This brings to mind wider questions about the limiting and yet simultaneously liberating qualities of rules, habits, conventions and manners. Are these constraints to be viewed as oppressive, conservative devices which, while allowing us to interact, ultimately limit the field and veracity of our mutually lived experiences? Or, are these rather to be seen as enabling mechanisms, tools which allow the rational, sensitive individual to act and interact from a base of certainty which opens up the possibility of transcendence?

Living in a society aware of its own postmodernity, which in its rejection of many of the old, top-down metanarratives and grand truths embraced a more relative and fragmentary approach, in many senses we already allow everything to be true at once. However, if we let everything be true at once, does this open the door to apathy and ennui, elicting a collective throwing up of hands? Is this in fact the end of the search for truth, the search for each other, for ourselves?



Would you be happier if you let everything be true at once?

Ex3 An Invitation. A Challenge

What I never had is being torn from me. What I did not live, I will miss forever.
An Invitation. A Challenge.

Dear Friends, Dear Collaborators,

As many of you know, Common Space: Gallery is still in its infancy, although on the basis of two succesful exhibitions, we have now been featured in the hallowed pages of FlashArt Magazine (text attached in EN). We would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you who have constituted the Common Space so far.

Common Space: Gallery is now pleased to announce a new exhibition in which we would very much like you to be involved.

In keeping with the spirit and mission of Common Space: Gallery, we want to provide a platform for a variety of people and groups, working in a variety of fields, disciplines and indisciplines to come together through their work in order to participate, engage and transgress.

The key concept of the exhibition is contained in the following line from the playwright/ poet Volker Braun.

"What I never had is being torn from me. What I did not live, I will miss forever."

We challenge you to interpret this statement in any way and through any medium you see fit in order to produce an interpretation that can be played, displayed, performed or in other ways manifested at an exhibition in late November. We challenge you specifically because we know you and believe in your creative talent and will.

We recognise that you are all much in demand and therefore some of you may not be able to devote such time to this project, which given the nature of our gallery will not be financially compensated, but we are confident that you will recognise the potential of this idea and hope that you feel able to contribute something to this exhibition. We hope that the relatively short time horizon for realising this exhibition will provoke spontaneous responses which draw on the feelings that we get when reading this statement.

We plan to hold the exhibition on 28 November 2008.

We would therefore ask you - if you feel that you can contribute something- to submit a proposal by Friday 7 November (fireworks being traditional on this day).

We will ask for an update on Wednesday 19 November and the works should be completed by Wednesday 26 November to allow time for installation and coordination before the exhibition which will open on 28 November at 1800h.

For those concerned with space, the common place this time around will be The Prague Unofficial House of Kultur at Nezamyslova 6, with both upstairs and downstairs spaces available, as well as the terrace. Those who need to are welcome to come and see the space by arrangement with me.
Those unable to come to prague but still wanting to submit work by post, email or telepathy can either ask for a description and photos or can use their imagination.

We would encourage broad and free interpretation of this statement, but if you feel as though you want more guidance then please feel free to contact me.

We look forward to working together with you on this exciting project which we think will take our Common Space to the next level.

Benjamin Tallis
Curator
Common Space: Gallery
+420 602 660 707

PS Everything is Political (EiP) will be running a separate, although related event on 27th November which will serve as the unofficial vorspiel for the exhibition.

Ex3 A Joint Adventure: Participation Framework and Resources

What I never had is being torn from me. What I did not live, I will miss forever

Kollectiv Exhibition // Discussion Space

Friday 28 November | Prague Unofficial Haus of Kultur | 1800h


Common Space: Gallery // Everything is Political

In an unprecedented move, Common Space: Gallery is joining with Everything is Political to create a unique night of politico-artistic participation, engagement and transcendence.

We will embark on this joint adventure under the title

“What I never had is being torn from me. What I did not live, I will miss forever.

In addition to the freshly minted artworks on display - which have been produced especially for this event - everyone present is invited to take part in a multimodal, multimedia, multiplicitous exploration of the politics of memory.

As well as engaging with the artworks and performance pieces that will be manifesting themselves, all attendees will participate in a round table discussion on the politics of memory. By examining particular ‘memory pieces’ we aim to foster a better understanding of contemporary modes of mourning, melancholia, nostalgia, amnesia and disavowal. In this way we hope to shed light on many interlinked trends in politics, culture and society. This will also highlight symbioses and parasitic tendencies as well as the benign and malign transgression between public and private, individual and collective. Crucially, we hope to gain insight into the meaning and significance of the politics of memory itself as well as using it to illuminate the possibilities of contemporary alterity and escape from permissive totality.

Everyone is asked to read the definitions below and to choose a ‘memory piece’ from film, literature, art, architecture, public monuments, states, music, or any other field they think appropriate and to analyse it in terms of its politics of memory.

After an introduction, the discussion will proceed through the presentation of these analyses by each person and a moderated discussion around the key themes that emerge. Ideally, this will also take in new insight and input gained from the artworks and performances manifested on the evening itself.

As well as the basic definitions included below, there are a series of examples of ‘works of memory’ which may inspire you to analyse them or other, similar or radically different works.
Furthermore, as well as the deliberately fragmentary notes from the book Requiem for Communism which are in a separate attachment, there are some suggestions for extended reading, should you be so bold.
So, you need to prepare a brief presentation on a memory piece of some kind to share with the group. Please ask for help and support if you need it.

This has the potential to be an exceedingly valuable and enlightening exercise. However, it will only work if you engage with it. You will get out what you put in but WE will get much more than the sum of the individual contributions. The additional collective benefit will increase with the number and quality of the contributions. Get Involved!

Suggestions
For your analysis and in the discussion, as well as in your engagement with the artworks, it may be useful to bear in mind the following. This may help you order your thoughts and make a format for your presentation.

What is being remembered (object)?
Has something been lost – if so, what is it (object)?
Who is doing the remembering (subject)?
What is the relationship between the subject and the object?
How (through what means) is the subject remembering the object?

Is this memory characterised by mourning, melancholia, nostalgia or disavowal or a combination or these?
What is the relationship in this memory between public and private, individual and collective?
What is the consequence of the loss of the object for the subject as an individual?
What is the consequence of the loss of the object for the collective, if this is relevant?
What is the consequence of the loss of the object in wider terms?

What impact has the form of memory (mourning, melancholia, disavowal, etc) had on the individual subject?
What impact has the form of memory (mourning, melancholia, disavowal, etc) had on the collective subject?

What are the significant aspects of time, space and place in relation to this memory work?
Is the piece well executed? Is it Art or Kitsch?
What has determined the form of memory (and its expression) for the individual, the collective and in wider terms?

What does the form of memory say about our current state of affairs?
What impact does the form of memory have on our options - individually, collectively and more widely?


Basic Definitions/ Points of Departure

The mourner can name the loss that stuns the melancholic.
The nostalgic disavows the loss altogether.

Memory
1. the mental capacity or faculty of retaining and reviving facts, events, impressions, etc., or of recalling or recognizing previous experiences.
2. this faculty as possessed by a particular individual: to have a good memory.
3. the act or fact of retaining and recalling impressions, facts, etc.; remembrance; recollection: to draw from memory.
4. the length of time over which recollection extends: a time within the memory of living persons.
5. a mental impression retained; a recollection: one's earliest memories.
6. the reputation of a person or thing, esp. after death; fame: a ruler of beloved memory.
7. the state or fact of being remembered.
8. a person, thing, event, fact, etc., remembered.
9. commemorative remembrance; commemoration: a monument in memory of Columbus.
10. the ability of certain materials to return to an original shape after deformation.
11. Also called computer memory, storage. Computers.
a. the capacity of a computer to store information subject to recall.
b. the components of the computer in which such information is stored.

Thinking of something that is not here or is not now.

Mourning
1. the act of a person who mourns; sorrowing or lamentation.
2. the conventional manifestation of sorrow for a person's death, esp. by the wearing of black clothes or a black armband, the hanging of flags at half-mast, etc.
3. the outward symbols of such sorrow, as black garments.

Additional: The work done by the subject in order to get over the loss of a loved or valued object, whatever this may be. This takes the loss from the realm of the real into the realm of the symbolic and allows the subject to move on, to at least some extent – the ‘healthy’ abstraction of grief, which will help the subject to overcome it.

Melancholia
1. a mental condition characterized by great depression of spirits and gloomy forebodings.
a gloomy state of mind, esp. when habitual or prolonged; depression.
2. sober thoughtfulness; pensiveness.
3.Archaic.
a. the condition of having too much black bile, considered in ancient and medieval medicine to cause gloominess and depression.
b. black bile.

–adjective
4. affected with, characterized by, or showing melancholy; mournful; depressed: a melancholy mood.
5. causing melancholy or sadness; saddening: a melancholy occasion.
6. soberly thoughtful; pensive.

A pathological state of mourning which traps the subject into living in a crushed state. A mental state of revolt against the imperative that the ‘love object’ be relinquished. The shadow of the object falls upon the ego. The object loss becomes an ego loss.

Nostalgia
1. a wistful desire to return in thought or in fact to a former time in one's life, to one's home or homeland, or to one's family and friends; a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or time: a nostalgia for his college days.

The longing for return to an idealised home.

Amnesia
1. Partial or total loss of memory, usually resulting from shock, psychological disturbance, brain injury, or illness.

In the case of public or collective memory, this could be the wilful exclusion of certain topics from public discourse or the collective sphere.

Disavowal
1. a disowning; repudiation; denial.
2. To disclaim knowledge of, responsibility for, or association with.

Repudiate
1. to reject as having no authority or binding force: to repudiate a claim.
2. to cast off or disown: to repudiate a son.
3. to reject with disapproval or condemnation: to repudiate a new doctrine.
4. to reject with denial: to repudiate a charge as untrue.
5. to refuse to acknowledge and pay (a debt), as a state, municipality, etc.

A defence mechanism triggered by the subject’s encounter with an intolerable force

Repress
1. to keep under control, check, or suppress (desires, feelings, actions, tears, etc.).
2. to keep down or suppress (anything objectionable).
3. to put down or quell (sedition, disorder, etc.).
4. to reduce (persons) to subjection.
5. Psychoanalysis. to reject (painful or disagreeable ideas, memories, feelings, or impulses) from the conscious mind.
–verb (used without object)
6. to initiate or undergo repression.

Neurosis
1. Also called psychoneurosis. A functional disorder in which feelings of anxiety, obsessional thoughts, compulsive acts, and physical complaints without objective evidence of disease, in various degrees and patterns, dominate the personality.
2. a relatively mild personality disorder typified by excessive anxiety or indecision and a degree of social or interpersonal maladjustment.

Subject
1. that which thinks, feels, perceives, intends, etc., as contrasted with the objects of thought, feeling, etc.
2. the self or ego.

Me, you, he/she, we, they

Object
1. a person or thing with reference to the impression made on the mind or the feeling or emotion elicited in an observer: an object of curiosity and pity.
2. anything that may be apprehended intellectually: objects of thought.
3. Metaphysics. something toward which a cognitive act is directed.
4. A focus of attention, feeling, thought, or action: an object of contempt.

What is/was valued or important (and has been lost)


Extended Literature// suggested authors

Sigmund Freud, esp - On Murder, Mourning & Melancholia
Jacques Lacan, esp - 6th seminar on desire and its interpretation
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno
Theodor Adorno
Julia Kristeva
Juergen Habermas
Clement Greenberg
Zygmunt Bauman
Walter Benjamin
Oscar Negt and Alexander Kluge
And many, many more…


Examples of Memory Pieces/Works
This is a fairly random sample, drawing on a variety of works, several of which are suggested by Charity Scribner, author of Requiem for Communism. These works are meant to be indicative of the breadth of works available and is in no way intended to be exhaustive!

Film
Krysztof Kieslowski – Three Colours (Blue, White, Red)
Andrzej Wajda - Man of Marble, Man of Iron
Florian Henckel Von Donnersmark – The Lives of Others
Rainer Werner Fassbinder – BRD Trilogy (Maria Braun, Veronika Voss, Lola)
Chantal Akerman – D’Est
Mark Herman – Brassed Off
Robert Zemeckis - Forrest Gump


Art
Anselm Kiefer - Generally. Eg Spiritual Heroes of Germany
Gerhard Richter - eg Looking at Meinhof
Joseph Beuys - Economic Values, and many others
Ilya Kabakov - eg The man who flew into space from his apartment
Christian Boltanski - eg East. West.
Pablo Picasso - eg Guernica
Gordon Matta Clark - eg Splitting
Damien Hirst - The Physical Impossibility of Death in the mind of someone living
Rachel Whiteread - eg House, Ghost, etc


Literature
Milan Kundera; Christa Wolf; Leslie Kaplan (& Marguerite Duras); Albert Camus; John Berger; WG Sebald; Robert Musil; Joseph Roth; Michel Houllebecq; Salman Rushdie;

Architecture
Public Monuments of any kind (think for example of the Jewish memorial in Berlin, the Metronom here in Prague, Nelson’s Column in London, The tombs of unknown soldiers in many locations…
National/regional parliaments, theatres, museums, galleries, flags, etc.
City plans and heritage monuments or areas, including protected/excluded areas, former/ current ghettoes, etc.

Specific buildings and sites such as the Palace of Science and Culture in Warsaw, the Lermonosov university in Moscow, The AlexanderPlatz TV Tower and the site of the former Palast der Republik in Berlin, the forthcoming Freedom Tower in New York.


Other: The states of Israel & Kosovo; Museums, Archives (eg OSCE or StaSi) and Depots; Art Exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale and Dokumenta and here in Prague – Communism never happened; TV programmes such as Retro, showcasing goods and products from another time. TV History programmes, Party political broadcasts – mixtures of the two such as Canadian Heritage minutes, etc, etc, etc, etc …

Common Space Gallery in FlashArt Magazine

Fakulta Solidarnosc Common Space Gallery









English Text

Participate Engage Transgress
Invite yourself into the Common Space

The Common Space: Gallery is a new venue for contemporary art in Prague which plays a different, yet complementary role to existing galleries. The Common Space: Gallery seeks to engage with publics who are not directly involved in the contemporary art scene, while maintaining a standard and focus that appeal to ‘insiders’. This blurs boundaries, providing an unintimidating setting for ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ to interact and creating a new critical public for the Prague art scene. The exhibitions that have taken place so far have introduced the gallery itself, foregrounding its politico-philosophical foundations and illuminating the wider concept of common spaces.

Common Spaces are platforms for engagement, mutual reflection, disagreement and transgression which question current perceptions of public, private and common. Genuine Common Spaces are spaces of “unfear” which embrace uncertainty and make virtue of vulnerability. Rejecting atomization and categorization in society gives us new opportunities to approach each other, secure in our identities and then allows us to transcend these through interaction with others and escape the unmediated world-making of insular groups.

There are no pre-determined outcomes in Common Spaces, rather they are spaces of possibility where the unusual interactions that take place and the debased settings they take place in are platforms for new creativity through solidarity and mutuality. The Common Space: Gallery is located in a bedroom which emphasises solidarity with artists who, in a marketised world dominated by decorators, have limited access to gallery space, while the changed topography allows for a different and less defined experience than in a formal gallery.

The Common Space: Gallery is part of the wider project of Common Spaces being undertaken by Fakulta Solidarnosc. Other Fakulta Solidarnosc actvities include The Prague Philosophy Club and Everything is Political: Prague Political Discussion Space, which hold regular events aimed at generating greater understanding of politics and philosophy in order that people can engage in better understand their own ideas as well as the forces that are acting on them globally and locally, publically and privately.