Bad Joke # 1 - 30 November 2007 - 6 January 2008, Tallinn Art Hall
(2007 12 14 11:11)
artists: Tamy Ben-Tor (USA), Nathalie Djurberg (Sweden), Peter Finnemore (Wales), Paul Granjon (Wales), Ivars Gravlejs (Latvia), Igor Grubic (Croatia), Zlatko Kopljar (Croatia), Tsui Kuang-Yu (Taiwan), Marko Mäetamm (Estonia), Jüri Ojaver (Estonia), Julian Rosefeldt (Great Britain), Tommi Toija (Finland)
"This exhibition has grown out of my own personal problems with adjusting to other people, often to those closest to me. In the tradition of the fundamental attribution error, as it is known in sociology, I tend to blame these problems on the unfavourable conditions. The onlookers, however, in the same unfortunate vein, usually see them as my “own fault” first of all. This controversy alone is enough to give life to images and more accurate concepts of inappropriate behaviour [...]
The colonialist, patronising relationship between the great white man and the small dark-skinned aborigine is the recurrent image providing the impetus for the present post-colonial critique of racism, globalisation, social segregation and cultural ghettoisation. I would not dare to promise that “Bad Joke” in its current version at the Tallinn Art Hall and later travelling to Latvia and Croatia with a growing number of participants, weighs in with a comment on all the various clusters of problems mentioned here. But we could hope that the artists in this exhibition demonstrate some inappropriate models of behaviour that, being uneasy and odd, shed light on the strict conventions that imperceptibly control our facial expressions at funerals and exhibition openings, our notions of gender roles, expectations of electric sockets and the Orient, or that form our attitude to the talking frankfurter. Routine everyday practices under the attack of changing life forms – could there be an experience more liberating than that?"
Johannes Saar (the curator)
More information on this website.
<< back