Friday 25 November (17:00 – 22:00)
Saturday 26 November (11:00 – 17.00)

Jacques Lacan,
“Television.”

Circuits & Currents, Project Space of the ASFA and the Unit of Entrepreneurship and Innovation of ASFA present the “politics of lies”. In recent years, a rising number of art practices from Greece have chosen to experiment with the use of lies and semblances. These cases experiment with public lies and their dissemination. The subtext of such paradigm is often a strategy of “overidentification” and “subversive affirmation.” In certain cases an exquisite trope of “underidentification” is employed, in the form of a hypotonic reproduction of established realities experienced as oppressive. The rise of such paradigms points to a spontaneous response to phenomena of “hypernormalization” in sociopolitical experience, and in public debates/discourses. The cynical (self)subversion of political alternatives, the recurring rhetoric around “national sovereignty” and its “loss”, the advertising of traditionalist lifestyles by new radicalist projects, this pendulum motion between heroic “resistance” and collective self-victimization, alongside the orientalism pertinent to the perception of Greek crisis by the global art-field and intelligentsia leave no room for neat and safe choices between “resistance” and “conformism.”

Lies and semblances emerge as ways to inhibit the totalizing effect of social normality, but also provide a fertile ground for addressing the symptomal intersections between desire, oppression, docility, and rupture. The practices presented in this mini-marathon of screenings, discussions and actions do not operate as concrete paradigms of unproblematic subversion, but model a composite “network” of acts challenging the humanistic representations of crisis and the hypocritical transformation of art into a “social service” apparatus.

 

Friday 25 November (17:00 – 22:00):

Mini-marathon on the “politics of lies.” Presentations, talks, performative actions by the participants. A screening and additional footage regarding the presented practices will be accessible in the space. This material will remain accessible for the day after.

Saturday 26 November (11:00 – 17.00):

Workshop on the history of the art of overidentification. Collective and personal experimentation with the construction of lies. Students and graduates of ASFA and Panteion University will be participating. Participation is open to everyone.

 

Curating and coordination of the Politics of Lies: Kostis Stafylakis.