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Deadpan Exchange at Conference in Preston (UK), November 2014

Sunday, November 9th, 2014

Conference: Harris Building Room 155, Friday 21/11/14, 10:30am – 3pm
Exhibition Preview: Friday 21/11/14, 3 – 5pm
Exhibition Open: 20/11/14 – 10/12/14, Weekdays 10 – 5pm

Hanover Project, Hanover Building, Bhailok Street, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, PR1 2HE

The purpose of this project is to explore perceptions of the city on a global scale. Artists are invited to reflect current cultural, social and political subjects through engagements with the built environment in which they live and / or work. The exhibition is the result of an open call for submissions, and works have been received from artists working in Ireland, Sweden, UK, Portugal, Lithuania, Denmark, Italy, Sweden, USA, Austria, Israel, Romania, Germany, and Qatar. A conference will take place alongside the exhibition at Hanover Project in Preston, where speakers will present themes central to the exhibition concept.

Remember! Finissage of Deadpan Exchange VIII on April 2 at 8pm

Sunday, March 30th, 2014

The Opening and Deadpan Exchange Presentation at Casa Maauad (MX)

Sunday, March 30th, 2014

Above: Opening event and performance of Deadpan Exchange VIII and Deadpan Exchange Presentation at Casa Maauad in Mexico City, March 2014. Photos by Victoria Lucas, Leanne Cunningham and Heidi Hove.

Installation views of Deadpan Exchange VIII

Thursday, March 27th, 2014

This exhibition presents seven artworks, framed in the context of an international exchange that explores an ongoing discourse around deadpan aesthetics and deadpan humour. This project, devised and initiated by Heidi Hove and Jonn Herschend, can be likened to a sort of deadpan relay, as artists from one country are invited to respond to artworks made by artists from another. When complete, the project will culminate in a large exhibition that showcases all contributions to the Deadpan Exchange. This evaluative overview will raise key questions about the theme and how it has been interpreted culturally, aesthetically and conceptually by those selected. The artists presented in this exhibition are responding to the works created by seven artists from Lithuania, who exhibited in Deadpan Exchange VII in Hanover Project, Preston 15 months ago.

The deadpan aesthetic provides an objective and unsentimental representation of its subject, with little emotive lead in for the viewer. Work of this nature relays an experience with no narration, no expression and no direction, so that the reading of subject matter is untainted, unbiased and uncomplicated by the artist. It speaks for itself. The deadpan aesthetic in the 1970’s was often performance led, such as the work of Yoko Ono, Martha Rosler, and Vito Acconci. In the 1990s deadpan photography took centre stage, widening the focus beyond the artists’ individual perspective to ‘a way of mapping the extent of the forces, invisible from a single human standpoint, that govern the manmade and natural world.’(1) Deadpan humour in art is complex and multi layered. The subject is presented with inscrutable delivery and can be serious, tragic, comedic, dark. There is an impassiveness to the work, an emotional stillness that leaves the viewer perplexed and thus open to gut reactions. This may emerge as an uneasy laugh, or a wrenching sadness that stays with them long after they leave the gallery. Bas Jan Ader’s I’m Too Sad to Tell You (1971) for example pulls the viewer towards a wave of emotions, without providing indication that the actions performed are significant or genuine. Ader does not acknowledge the camera as his facial expression shifts from expulsions of tears and grimaces to moments of suspended elegance, as if waiting for the next wave of emotion to begin. Like most of his work, the film teeters on the brink of self-control as he seemingly waits for a release, for that moment of letting go.

If we consider popular culture on the other hand, responses to emotive subjects are often measured and controlled. If a feature film or television programme succeeds in moving the viewer to tears with its content, for example, the viewer feels a pang of embarrassment when caught in a moment of emotional ‘weakness’. In some television sitcoms, laughter is inserted artificially so that the sound of joy is controlled, forced, timely and of a certain quality. It seems significantly poignant when we consider that the man who invented canned laughter, Charles Douglass, did so after returning home from the Second World War. It is in this context that we can consider David Mackintosh’s response to the work of Lithuanian artist Robertas Narkus. The Absent Audience Show (2012) was a sound installation by Narkus that recontextualised the spectacle of canned laughter, generating a synthetic haunting as one entered the gallery. David Mackintosh’s Sadness and its Friends (2014) responds to this work by considering the application of canned laughter to early British situation comedy, such as Handcock’s Half Hour, The Likely Lads and Rising Damp. Often tinged with tragedy, these post war sitcoms epitomize a characterization and writing method that acknowledges tragic events underneath a veil of humour, whilst depicting familiar everyday situations. Mackintosh’s animation seeks to unravel this underlying sadness, turning to a composer who actively sought to encompass sorrow for inspiration. Henryk Goreki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs from 1976 primarily focuses on separation through war as subject matter. Mackintosh has made the work in this exhibition whilst listening to Goreki’s expression of sadness, the resulting animation containing a balanced mixture of emotion that is akin to Ader’s I’m Too Sad to Tell You. Tragic events are sandwiched between calm, normal, reassuring scenes.

In the context of ‘deadpan’, there are other underlying similarities that can be found in the works exhibited. Some artists have examined the ridiculous; one work mocks the absurdity of women’s magazines, whilst another provides us with photographic illustrations of buildings that should not be built in the city of Preston, using somewhat bizarre props. Michael Day presents us with a suspended military helicopter, a vehicle often associated with war poised in mid air as static glitches move rhythmically to an imagined rotating propeller. No Name (2013) is a looped digital capture of paused analogue video that halts time and dislocates meaning. Its threatening presence is frozen, and leads the viewer to question what happened before and after this moment, whilst perhaps encouraging one to consider the way in which we engage with televised images of war that are mediated, sanitized and easily removed from view at the touch of a button. Responding to the works of Laura Stasiulytė, Day playfully suspends this image and presents us with a ‘strange kind of non-motion’.

Means of mass communication repeatedly penetrate our consciousness, so that imagery and digitized experiences and events have a significant impact upon the way one lives. Through the appropriation of fliers, magazines and newspapers, Lesley Guy responds to the ‘absurdity, quantity and quality’ of information we are inundated with on a daily basis. In her installation Variations on a Theme – The Golden Girls (2014), Guy responds to the work of Akvilé Anglickaite’s The Letter(2012) with a series of sculptures using paper mache in conjunction with magazine imagery. Anglickaite’s video work is focused around a letter published in Tarybinė Moteris (The Soviet Women) in 1982, which depicted an observation of everyday life whilst incorporating propaganda that seems ridiculous from a contemporary perspective. It is unclear whether the woman’s experience in the letter is real or not, and if we look objectively at British magazines such as Woman’s Own, we see similar absurdities driven by capitalism, aimed at women. John Berger, when discussing the effects of advertising, comments that the publicity image ‘steals a woman’s love for herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product’ (2). Magazines are a good example of this, blurring the boundaries between fantasy and reality by juxtaposing advertising, the latest soap dilemmas, celebrity gossip and real-life dramas. The process of separating oneself from the language of mass communication reveals this calculated trickery, and Guy’s sculptures present a jarring contradiction as she applies glossy versions of female identity to paper-pulp forms.

Charles Quick presents a series of numbered photographs entitled A model of an Iconic building that should not be built in Preston (2014), which responds toVilnius Postcards (2009) by Lithuanian artist Arūnas Gudaitis. Like Guy, Quick presents us with a series of unconventional and witty representations, focusing on models for 21st Century utopian architecture. Utilizing a collection of small pocket sized objects obtained by the artist over a number of years, Quick holds up each one for the viewer so that its scale is proportionate to the urban landscape beyond. The objects in this context adopt the functionality of an iconic building – a feature on the skyline that commands the viewers attention, a selfish distraction from the collective urban landscape upon which it is situated. In his proposal, Charles Quick quotes from Oliver Wainwright’s 2013 Guardian article The Cheesegrater: Richard Rogers sprinkles the Square Mile, in which Wainwright discusses the new Rogers building and its relationship to the skyline of London;

‘Alongside it stands the curvaceous Gherkin and, to the south and bulging like a bouncer, the Walkie-Talkie. In addition to these towers, there are plans for a building shaped like a can of ham, another like a knife, and yet another like a rolled-up napkin. The City of London is becoming a bizarre dinner party in the sky’. (3)

Reminiscent of Claus Oldenberg’s drawn visualizations of unfeasible large-scale monuments as they appear in situ, Quick’s proposals appear at once ridiculously magnificent, egotistically monolithic, and unashamedly insensitive. As a humorous inventory of what not to do, we are encouraged to think about the future of 21st Century architecture and of Preston, England’s newest city.

The performative aspect of Quick’s photography is echoed in the works of Simon Le Ruez, collaborative duo Mathew Gregory and Karin Bergström, and in the final closing sequence of my video After (2013), which draws on the relentless irritation of advertising explored in Aistė Valiūtė and Daumantas Plechavičius’ piece Ultra Vires (2012). After is a 20 minute film that studies a condemned brutalist building as if the lens were dutifully studying a photograph. A trope to the failures of contemporary consumer culture under capitalism, an empty modernist shell that was once Sheffield’s vibrant market hall is the subject of failed utopia, captured using methods akin to the deadpan photographers of the 1990’s. After the viewer is taken slowly and silently through the isles and lifeless halls, a woman is imagined sitting in a disused cafe. With deadpan delivery, the woman sings a song from her fading memory, the words interrupting the silence of the space with a warning. In contrast to Quick’s outlandish utopian proposals, this visionary design was realized, and for many has become part of Sheffield’s brutalist heritage, despite its unkept facade.

Simon Le Ruez draws directly on the performative stance of the figure depicted in Milda Zabarauskaitė’s untitled photograph from 2012. The positioning of the hand, which rests mindfully against the subject’s hip, was for Le Ruez reminiscent of the poise and elegance of a Flamenco dancer or Matador. Interested in the ‘evocation of balance, movement, ceremony and celebration’, Le Ruez presents the spectator with an assemblage of mixed media in which ‘refined and colour coded structures collide with pictorial imagery’. When visiting Le Ruez in his studio to view Torero(2013) for the first time, I was struck by the elegance of this work. Playfully constructed using an eclectic array of materials and media, the impassive gaze of the female matador from underneath a beaded surface immediately creates a feeling of discord between the violent nature of bull fighting and the beauty and grace of the spectacle. The matador is after all highly skilled in deadpan delivery.

The deadpan aesthetic is marked by a careful pretense of seriousness, a non-expression set up to elicit a reaction in the participant. Its delivery relies on language or some form of communication in order for the recipient to understand the purposeful irony of the situation. For example Projet Pour un Texte (1969) by Marcel Broodthaers is a videoed performance that sets itself up for failure, as the artist passionately writes a letter in the pouring rain. As the ink washes from the page the artist continues, and the shambolic nature of this slapstick act results in smiles and laughter from the audience. But there is an underlying sentiment about communication, about language and expression, which makes this work beautifully poetic. In the same way, the collaboration entitled Förstå [Understand] (2014) between Swedish artist Karin Bergström and British artist Mat Gregory deconstructs tangible expression. The works playing through the speakers were created by Bergström, who recorded the sound of her poetry and diary entries, firstly in Swedish and then with English translations. The sound waves of these recordings were then interpreted as musical notation and performed on a music box. Gregory’s field recordings and narratives playing through the headphone set are taken from the same time period in which Bergström composed her written works. These sounds mark a moment without detail, and provide a dialogue between the pair without words. In their proposal the artists pose two questions; ‘how can we find the language of emotions?’ and ‘how, without expressions or words, can we communicate our emotions through sound alone?’. Responding to the workCandy Shop (2012) by Lina Lapelyte, the installation explores ‘the possibility of understanding an emotion without a mutual language’, through the deadpan presentation of sound.

The eclectic mix of themes in this exhibition is driven by the artists and their individual practices and interests, the conceptual content of the works exhibited in Deadpan Exchange VII, and by the overarching theme of deadpan in art.  The complexity of this project has resulted in 7 works that are skillful in fulfilling these criteria, each one balanced in both its response to the work and to a wider critical dialogue. It may be too early to provide an evaluative commentary on the exchange and the cultural, aesthetic and conceptual implications that have been initiated by this international conversation. Yet we can see themes emerging; fantasy and failure, comedy and tragedy, beauty and violence. All of these elements allow us to form an understanding of what it is to be human in the 21st Century.

Exhibition text written by Victoria Lucas
Curator of Deadpan Exchange VIII

End Notes

1 Cotton, Charlotte (2004). The Photograph as Contemporary Art. London, Thames & Hudson.

2 Berger, John (1972) Ways of Seeing. London, Penguin Books / British Broadcasting Corporation

3 Wainwright, Owen (2013). The Cheesegrater: Richard Rogers sprinkles the Square Mile. [Online]. The Guardian, 16 June.

To find more information in Spanish about Deadpan Exchange VIII at Casa Maauad in Mexico City, please click here

Deadpan Exchange arrives in Mexico City in March 2014

Wednesday, March 5th, 2014

Deadpan Exchange VIII: Mexico City
Organized by Heidi Hove (DK) and Jonn Herschend (US), curated by Victoria Lucas (UK)

Casa Maauad, Altamirano 20, Colonia San Rafael Delegación Cuauhtemoc, CP.06470 México DF

Featuring the work of Charles Quick (UK), David Mackintosh (UK), Lesley Guy (UK), Mat Gregory (UK) and Karin Bergström (SE), Michael Day (UK), Simon Le Ruez (UK) and Victoria Lucas (UK).

Press and Artist Preview: Thursday March 20, 2014 at 6pm
Open for the Public: Thursday March 20, 2014 at 8pm
Opening Night Performance, Förstå [Understand] by Karin Bergström & Mat Gregory

Deadpan Exchange Presentation and Video Screening: Saturday March 22, 2014 at 12pm
Finissage and Presentation of the Mexican based Artists, Saturday, April 5 at 8pm
Exhibition Opening Hours: Open by appointment only

The work presented by the eight UK based artists is the eight part series of international deadpan exchanges, which began in Denmark and Berlin in the summer of 2007. In each of the shows, the artists are actively involved in a give-and-take of deadpan communication… a sort of classic comedy exchange. The work exhibited at the Casa Maauad by the seven UK artists/groups is a reaction to the work of the seven Lithuanian based artists, who exhibited at Hanover Project in Preston (UK) for Deadpan Exchange VII in November 2012.

Deadpan is a form of comic delivery in which humor is presented without a change in emotion or facial expression, usually speaking in a monotonous manner. This puts the burden of interpretation on the viewer. Is the scene comedy or tragedy?

From an art historical standpoint, the shows take their cue from the deadpan strategies employed by artists in the early 1970’s throughout much of the world: Yoko Ono, Martha Rosler, Bas Jan Ader and Vito Acconci… to name a few. Their works were a formal rejection of the institutions, the world of “Modern Art,” in favor of a more democratic interaction with the work. In many cases, the work, which often boarded on the absurd or tragic, was delivered with a complete straight face, forcing the viewer to decide how they felt about the work.

The Deadpan Exchange Series is probing this ground in a global way. What happens if you start a joke in one country and respond to it in another? Is there an international deadpan language? Is deadpan universal? From a political standpoint, the organizers are concerned with the way the world is becoming increasingly black and white without any room for something gray and muddled. It is important to offer work that actively challenges the viewer to interpret the work for him or herself. And the Deadpan aesthetic offers a way to both engage and challenge the viewer at the same time. The organizers are also interested in bringing a diverse group of artists together from different places throughout the world and starting a dialogue that might not take place outside of formal institutions.

At the end of Deadpan Exchange VIII, seven Mexican artists will create reactions to the works of the seven English artists, and these reactions will be exhibited in another country (the location of which is still being determined). In the end, we intend to have a final exhibition back in Copenhagen with all the artists’ works in near future.

For more information or to arrange a visit, please contact:
Luz C Pro: luz@gastv.mx or Jonn Herschend: jonnherschend@gmail.com or visit this site: www.casamaauad.com – or find us on Facebook.

Deadpan Exchange VIII is proudly supported by:

Performance by Lina Lapelyte (UK/LT) for the Opening of Deadpan Exchange VII in Preston

Tuesday, December 4th, 2012

Photos by Victoria Lucas and Heidi Hove

This is London, performance, 20’, 2012, by Lina Lapelyte.

Lina Lapelyte lives and works in London and Vilnius. She is an artist, composer, musician and performer currently exploring the phenomena of song. Lina Lapelyte has been exhibiting and performing at the Ikon (Birmingham); BBC proms(London); Tate modern (London); CAC (Vilnius), Skopje Bienalle (Skopje); Royal Festival Hall (London); Spor (Aarhus); Echoraum (Wien); Holland Festival (Amsterdam).

The Opening and Installation Views from Deadpan Exchange VII

Tuesday, December 4th, 2012

Arūnas Gudaitis: Vilnius Postcards, 10 color postcards, offset print, 2009.

Vilnius Postcards, a series of photos, is a response to The Vilnius Notebook by artist Mindaugas Navakas – utopian sculptural interpretations of the city (1981-1986). After more than 20 years, the images of Vilnius are reconstructed in the form of postcards characteristic to 1970’s style. It allows us to experience the same situations anew and reveal an ideological basis of the selected objects and their transformation.

Arūnas Gudaitis is reacting to the work of Jana Jakimovska (MK), Skopje 2014, from Deadpan Exchange VI.

Laura Stasiulytė Suspended in the air, 2-channel video loop, 2012.

Laura Stasiulytė is interested in the act of separation – knocking off one from the many – and the exact moment before the particle is going down… the moment of overhang and disorientation.

This is a fraction of a second, as seen in the videos, when the pendulum impacts the corn and floats into the air.  It becomes “intoxicated and lost” for some time (a thousandth part of a second), without being moved to one direction or the other and remains floating in the air.

The same is true of the basketball, which has been thrown out into the air and accidentally stacked in a giant kinetic public sculpture (a weathercock).  It keeps moving “forever” at the whim of the wind direction.

Laura Stasiulytė is reacting to the work of Maja Kirovska (MK), Sisyphus Where is the exit?, from Deadpan Exchange VI.

Aistė Valiūtė and Daumantas Plechavičius Ultra Vires, interactive object-installation, plastic box, tablet PC, speakers, 2012.

Ultra Vires* is an interactive installation which does nothing but usurp the audience’s attention with irritating measures: it keeps on weeping as long as no one is looking at it. Equipped with custom programmed computer vision software, the insistent system monitors the audience’s faces. Once it detects a gaze, it rewards the spectator with silence. What is done with the catch at the other side of the wire, however, is left as an open-ended story. The installation is the satire of contemporary capitalist reality.  It is a reality that has been forced onto the consumers’ aimless time and brain resources.

* Ultra vires is a Latin phrase meaning literally “beyond the powers”. If an act requires legal authority and it is done without such authority, it is characterized in law as ultra vires.

Aistė Valiūtė and Daumantas Plechavičius is reacting to the work of Maja Kirovska (MK), Sisyphus Where is the exit?, from Deadpan Exchange VI.

Lina Lapelyte ‘Candy Shop’ video, 3’47’’. This is London, performance, 20’, 2012.

Candy Shop is a song by 50-Cent and Lina Lapelyte; this is London is a song by Akala and Lina Lapelyte. Both of the songs belong to the series of videos and performances also called Candy Shop by Lina Lapelyte. In Candy shop Lapelyte revisits well-known hip hop songs and uses her own voice and folk song like melodies to question gender and the mundane. Using song as an object Lina examines the issues of displacement, otherness and beauty. Re-enactment supports her investigation into aesthetics, control and reality.

Lina Lapelyte is reacting to MK artist, Ilija Prokopievs’ work “Untitled”, from Deadpan Exchange VI.

Robertas Narkus The Absent audience show, sound installation, 2012.

In the early 1950’s a sound engineer Charley Douglas invented a “sweetening” technique, which is commonly known as a use of an additional laugh track to “enhance” the laughter for television audiences. Robertas Narkus re-contextualizes this method and brings the laugh track to the gallery space.

Robertas Narkus is reacting to the work of Zorica Zafirovska (MK) from Deadpan Exchange VI

Milda Zabarauskaitė, Untitled, digital print 21×28, 2012.

Milda wraps up the words “All beauty will die” used by Velimir around her hand transforming the text into an object, which reminds of a bracelet. Through this transformation the text transgress from the realm of language to the sphere of object hood.

Milda Zabarauskaite reacts to the wall text piece of Velimir Zhernovski (MK) from Deadpan Exchange VI.

Akvilė Anglickaitė, The Letter, video 4’34’’, 2012.

The text in the film is a letter from a woman taken from the Soviet woman’s magazine “Tarybinė Moteris” (The Soviet woman). The magazine issue is from the year of 1982, the year I was born. The letter is an observation of everyday life subtly with propaganda that seems a bit ridiculous from today’s perspective.  It is unclear whether woman’s experience is real or fiction. The voice-over with American English accent makes these observations even more absurd and questionable. They are as questionable and absurd as the attempts to create communist society everywhere. The images will speak for themselves.

Akvilė Anglickaitė is reacting to the work of Angel Miov (MK) from Deadpan Exchange VI

Deadpan Exchange VII

Sunday, November 25th, 2012

Installation views from Deadpan Exchange VI

Thursday, November 24th, 2011

Above and from the left:

Maja Kirovska: “Sisyphus! Where is the exit?”, video-installation, TRT: 2:21 min, 2011. Maja Kirovska is reacting to the work of Nur Muskara from Deadpan Exchange V

Angel Miov: “At the Side of a Suicide” video, TRT: 2:38 min, 2011. Angel Miov is reacting to the work of Elcin Ekinci from Deadpan Exchange V

Gjorgje Jovanovic: “Poverty and Creativity”, a series of photographs, advertisements and articles, various dimensions, 2011. Gjorgje Jovanovic is reacting to the work of Suat Ogut from Deadpan Exchange V

Ilija Prokopiev: “Untitled”, 11 drawings, framed, 18 x 24 cm, acrylic and watercolor on paper, 2011. Ilija Prokopiev is reacting to the work of Fatma Chiftci from Deadpan Exchange V

Jana Jakimovska: Skopje 2014, six postcards, 2011. Jana Jakimovska is reacting to work of Esra Okyay from Deadpan Exchange V

Velimir Zhernovski: “All Beauty Will Die”, wall text, 2011. Velimir Zhernovski is reacting to the work of Mehmet Dere from Deadpan Exchange V

Zorica Zafirovska: “Invisible” Ink on large scale paper at the VGAC Gallery and stencils in the public space in Vilnius, 2011. Zorica Zafirovska is reacting to the work of Nejat Sati from Deadpan Exchange V

Installation views of the exhibition

Deadpan Exchange Presentations and Talks

Deadpan Exchange Video-screening

The facade of the VGAC Gallery, Vilnius (LT)

Deadpan Exchange VI, Vilnius (LT), November 2011

Tuesday, October 25th, 2011

Deadpan Exchange VI Flyer
Deadpan Exchange VI: Vilnius
Organized by Heidi Hove (DK) and Jonn Herschend (US)

Vilnius Graphic Art Centre, Latako str. 3, Vilnius

Featuring the work of Velimir Zernovski (MK), Gjorgje Jovanovik (MK), Maja Kirovska (MK), Jana Jakimovska (MK), Zorica Zafirovska (MK), Ilija Prokopiev (MK) and Matej Bogdanovski (MK).

Curated by Ksenija Cockova (MK)

Opening and Presentation of the Deadpan Exchange series: Saturday November 5, 2011 at 4:00 pm
Deadpan Exchange Video-screening: Sunday November 6, 2011 at 4:00 pm

Excerpts from the Lithuanian press release:

Tarptautinis kultūrinių renginių ciklas „Deadpan Exchange“ 2007 m. prasidėjo Vokietijoje ir Danijoje. VI-ojoje tęstinio projekto dalyje Vilniaus grafikos meno centre pristatoma septynių Makedonijos menininkų kūryba. Parodoje eksponuojami darbai yra reakcija ir atsakas į „Deadpan Exchange V“ parodoje Makedonijoje (CK kultūros centras, Skopjė, 2010) pristatytą Turkijos menininkų kūrybą.

Kiekvieno „Deadpan Exchange“ pasirodymo metu menininkai iš skirtingų šalių keičiasi sausojo humoro(angl. deadpan) sąmojais. Sausasis humoras – tai humoro forma, kuomet sąmojis žiūrovui yra pateikiamas be emocijų ar veido išraiškos pasikeitimų, kalbant monotonišku balsu. Tokį humorą yra sudėtinga interpretuoti bei sunkiau suprasti, ar matyta scena buvo komedija ar tragedija.

Meno istorijos kontekste tokio pobūdžio kūryba nėra naujiena. „Deadpan Exchange“ dalyviai įkvėpimo sėmėsi iš sausojo humoro strategijų, kurias XX a. 7-ojo dešimtmečio pradžioje naudojo daugelis žymių kūrėjų, pvz.: Yoko Ono, Martha Rosler, Bas Jan Ader, Vito Acconci, Gordon Matta Clark, Lygia Clark ir Helio Oiticica. Savo darbais jie siekė atsisakyti formalių institucijų bei modernaus meno pasaulio primetamų taisyklių vardan demokratiškesnės sąveikos su kūriniu.

Renginių serija „Deadpan Exchange“ siekia tarptautiniu mastu tirti sausojo humoro veiklos lauką. Renginio organizatoriai kelia klausimus: kas atsitinka, kai pradedi sąmojį vienoje šalyje, o atsakai į jį kitoje? Ar egzistuoja tarptautinė sausojo humoro kalba? Ar sausasis humoras yra visuotinis?
Autoriams svarbu pristatyti kūrinius, kurie įtrauktų bei skatintų žiūrovų interpretacijas. Organizatoriai siekia suburti skirtingų šalių menininkų grupes, kurios komunikuotų ir keistųsi dialogais, vargiai vykstančiais už formalių institucinių sienų.

Baigiantis „Deadpan Exchange VI“ renginiui septyni Lietuvos autoriai pateiks savo reakcijas į septynių parodoje Lietuvoje dalyvaujančių makedonų kūrybą. Šios reakcijos kartu su visais šio projekto metu sukurtais darbais 2012–2013 m. bus pristatytos paskutinėje „Deadpan Exchange“ parodoje Kopenhagoje.

Find more info at: http://www.graphic.lt

The exhibition has been supported by: