December 01, 2014 — December 31, 2014
Oliver Ressler
The Situation
Senior Curator
Lanfranco Aceti
Location
Kasa Gallery, Istanbul
Curator
Jonathan Munro
The Situation is an exhibition by Oliver Ressler for the Museum of Contemporary Cuts (MoCC) and Kasa Gallery and is curated by Lanfranco Aceti. The artist presents a series of artworks that engage with the contemporary social and financial crises. Ressler has worked on the theme of the contemporary post-postcapitalistic society and its crises both as an artist and as a curator. Con Ressler the Museum of Contemporary Cuts and Kasa Gallery continue to engage with the contemporary and prolonged economic crisis and brings to the fore international artists and curators to showcase and discuss the political and economic implications of the dismantling of democracy in favor of oligarchic corporate systems of governance.
The Situation collects Ressler’s recent artworks and displays them as a social media practice – questioning the consumption of the images as well as modalities of constructions of engagements in increasingly disconnected societies – where the political element is no longer represented as a direct consequence of economic and social actions. Both the artworks and the curatorial framework analyze and problematize contemporary aesthetic structures by asking questions that remand necessarily to an historical analysis of our times as a byproduct of complex philosophical traditions and interpretations.
Artworks
Films
Artist
Oliver Ressler is an artist and filmmaker who produces installations, projects in public space, and films on issues such as economics, democracy, migration, the climate crisis, forms of resistance and social alternatives.
Ressler has had solo exhibitions at Berkeley Art Museum, USA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade; Centro Cultural Conde Duque, Madrid; Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum, Egypt; The Cube Project Space, Taipei; Kunsthaus Graz, Graz and comprehensive solo exhibitions at Wyspa Institute of Art, Gdansk; Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz; Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo – CAAC, Seville; SALT Galata, Istanbul; MNAC – National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest; and Cultural Centre of Belgrade.
Ressler has participated in more than 400 group exhibitions, including Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven; MASSMoCA, North Adams, USA; Centre Pompidou, Paris; the biennials in Prague (2005), Seville (2006), Moscow (2007), Taipei (2008), Lyon (2009), Gyumri (2012), Venice (2013), Athens (2013, 2015), Quebec (2014), Helsinki (2014), Jeju (2017), Kyiv (2017), Gothenburg (2019) and Stavanger (2019), and at Documenta 14, Kassel, 2017 (exhibition organized by EMST).
Ressler has completed thirty-eight films that have been screened in thousands of events of social movements, art institutions and film festivals. A retrospective of his films took place at Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève in 2013.
In 2002, Ressler won the first prize at the International Media Art Award of the ZKM in Karlsruhe and he is the first prize winner of the newly established Prix Thun for Art and Ethics Awardin 2016.
For the Taipei Biennale 2008, Ressler curated an exhibition on the counter-globalization movement, A World Where Many Worlds Fit. A travelling show on the financial crisis, It’s the Political Economy, Stupid, co-curated with Gregory Sholette, has been presented at nine venues (2011-2016), including Pori Art Museum in 2013.
Since 2019 Ressler directs Barricading the Ice Sheets, a research project on the climate justice movement, funded by the Austrian Science Fund, that will lead to an exhibition at Camera Austria in Graz in September 2021.
