WhiteBox | New York presents in collaboration with Dukley Art Center | Montenegro / December 2016
Location: Deauville Parking Garage | 6625 Indian Creek Drive Miami Beach, FL
Recycling Religion, curated by Juan Puntes and Marat Guelman, is a group exhibition, installation, new media and performance by a radical group of Eastern European Artists and select Western counterparts.
As the post Soviet Block countries have been shedding their eight decades’ long Communist ideology, the element of Faith has replaced it. In a paradoxical, unwarranted mode, the once dormant Orthodox Church has become an intrinsic part of ‘The State,’ overseeing all aspects of life well beyond the spiritual. From dress code, to art and entertainment, to life and love at large, religion attempts to impose upon the people it’s old moral, oppressive behavior and rancid style… little escapes it. In doing so, what may have once been spiritual about the Church has now become a dead-end victim of activating past anachronisms upon a present future.
The exhibition-project Recycling Religion leans more on the actual act of ‘Recycling’ than on ‘Religion’ per se. Ironically, the underlying topic of this diverse, striking multi-media art and performance proposal is the gauging contemporary artists’ use of the shell of “dead ideologies.” Susceptible to the frailty of the traditional artist, a simple twist of fate becomes prey to the ‘New’ even though ‘de novo’ may have its origins in the ‘Old’.
The curators purposefully selected this dystopic theme as a reflection of the present-day world, inviting a select, radical milieu of contemporary artists to comment upon, through installation, video, performance and new technologies, two forces. One force engages in tearing the world apart while pretending to mend life, the other, emulating our physical biology, bringing forth the need for reconstruction from the ‘spent’. The works these terrific, singular artists come up with will thrill any and all contemporary art public.
Artists List
Pussy Riot, Pavel Brat, Alexander Kosolapov, Alex Melamid, Electroboutique, Robert Priseman, Vladimir Kozin, Dmitry Gutov, Jusuf Hadžifejzović, Arsen Savadov, Ilija Šoškić, Anatoly Osmolovsky, Jelena Tomasevic and Andriy Bazyuta
*More artists to be announced
