Essay in: IDENTITY - Katalog Werkschau Nr. 45
On Pages: Format: 22x19cm


Author: Images and texts: Oreet Ashery, Hubert Blanz, Katharina Cibulka, Shahram Entekhabi, Gianmaria Gava, Conny Habbel, Orit Ishay, Peter Köllerer, Friedl Kubelka, Astrid Korntheuer, Trish Morrissey, Julia Müller-Maenher, Liza Nguyen, Natascha Stellmach, Tim Sharp, Oliver Ressler & Dario Azzellini, Christian Wachter
Publisher: Fotogalerie Wien
Pages: 144
Published in 2011

Fotogalerie Wien

Comuna under construction, by Oliver Ressler & Dario Azzellini, pp. 124-129

in:

IDENTITY
Katalog Werkschau Nr. 45


“What constitutes identity today?” is one of the questions posed by the curatorial team at Fotogalerie Wien in the context of the annual Theme of Focus for 2010. The three-part exhibition series focuses on the issues of identity at present, in its multi-faceted and processual form. It also includes presenting artistic positions that mirror the inconclusive and, more particularly, the ambiguous aspects of identity of today’s late modernist subject: The artists visualize how the interwoven formation of personal and collective identities paradoxically oscillate between internal and external determinations of self.

The initial exhibition in this series, IDENTITY I: Biography, reflects upon the relationship of biography and identity, as the “ongoing process of day-to- day identity negotiation”. How does one deal with biographical self- awareness in today’s society? The selected artworks demonstrate how, for any phase of life and developmental task at hand, there exist various contradictory and divergent identity fragments that dominate in any given biography, which must be synthesized through the interplay of demands coming from within and without. Particularly the serial nature of all five of the artistic statements shown refers to the fragmented and inconstant quality of today’s subject.

The topic of the second exhibition, Identity II – Forming Identity, questions ambivalent models of interpreting the formation of identity, that, depending on the context, diverge between identification and ideologization: According to Jan Assmann, collective identity is only “as strong or as weak as it is alive in the thoughts and actions of the group members […]”. It is the expression of that which connects people to each other through homogeneous self- and cultural identifiers and is how individuals identify themselves.

The forming of identity however, becomes suspect of being ideology as soon as it begins to delineate the adoption of cultural homogeneity or historical continuity. The manipulative use of identity to form a symbolic entity shows how it can be instrumentalized for the construction of larger groups. Such universalizing tendencies reveal themselves as a normative suggestion, thereby manifesting the affiliation of identity with autonomy even more significantly.
 
For the final show in this series, IDENTITY III – Positioning, the curatorial collective at Fotogalerie Wien has invited artists who deal critically with the positioning of the subject in late modernism. While in early modernism, collective identities provided a secure framework, one in which individual identities also had their place, formerly stabilizing factors (such as class, nation, ethnicity, culture, religion or gender) are subject to tendencies that dissolve such categories in late modernism. From the current yearning for positioning, a desire to experience a sense of belonging and social recognition can be sensed, since the late modernist (post)colonialist world, as a result of globalization, is influenced by a world view without boundaries, in which the mediatization furthermore has a normative effect on identity. Such social processes of individualization as well as pluralization lead to the destabilization and fragmentation of identities. More than ever, the relevance of power structures thereby comes to the fore, in which the issue of social belonging drastically reveals itself as a struggle for inclusion and exclusion.

Images and texts: Oreet Ashery, Hubert Blanz, Katharina Cibulka, Shahram Entekhabi, Gianmaria Gava, Conny Habbel, Orit Ishay, Peter Köllerer, Friedl Kubelka, Astrid Korntheuer, Trish Morrissey, Julia Müller-Maenher, Liza Nguyen, Natascha Stellmach, Tim Sharp, Oliver Ressler & Dario Azzellini, Christian Wachter

Texts: Claudia Marion Stemberger