Next week in Beirut
Critical Machines (Exhibition)
Exhibition Opening: 6 March, 2014, 6:00 – 9:00PM
Location: AUB Byblos Bank Art Gallery
Artists in the Exhibition
Art & Language, Burak Arikan, Freee art collective, Janah Hilwé, Khalil Rabah, Vadim Zakharov
*And*
A Bookshelf with critical machines by: André Breton, Critical Art Ensemble, Marcel Duchamp, Andrea Fraser, Heresies Collective, William Hogarth, György Galántai and Júlia Klaniczay (Artpool), Kenneth Goldsmith, Hans Haacke & Pierre Bourdieu, Pablo Helguera, Garnet Hertz, Wassily Kandinsky, Allan Kaprow, Hassan Khan, Andrei Monastyrsky, William Morris, Walid Raad, Ad Reinhardt, Temporary Services, Gregory Sholette, Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi and others.
In the language of contemporary labor processes and manufacturing equipment, a “critical machine” is a piece of equipment designated and programmed to monitor and report on other machines in the production chain. Critical machines are deployed as preventive maintenance measures to guard against equipment malfunctioning and the disruption of the production flow. The main goal of the critical machine is to inform the human operator about urgently required systemic adjustments.
We apply this machinic analogy to the world of contemporary art as a central motif, even a provocation, that might unsettle certain assumptions about the modes of production and the circulation of art today. Within the broader scheme of things, Critical Machines is about Critique. It is about a specifically modern attitude, which relies heavily on rationality and reason, enjoys questioning authority and accepted practices and seeks to determine – as Immanuel Kant did consecutively with his logical machines, the three Critiques – the conditions of possibility under which we may learn what we can know, what we ought to do, and what we may hope…
For more information on this exhibition, please click here.
