Installation views, All Our Secrets
Group show, Center for Contemporary Arts Celje, curated by Katrin Mundt
July 19 – September 23, 2018
There Is Light in Every Window (V), 2018
Silkscreen prints on paper, unique copies
Dimensions variable
Participating artists: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Apparatus 22, Simon Asencio, Bureau of Inverse Technology, Lenka Đorojević and Matej Stupica, Mario García Torres, Kallabris, Staš Kleindienst, Martin Kohout, Susanne Kriemann, Felipe Mujica, Adrian Paci, Stefan Panhans
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Press release excerpt: Why is it that secrets, and in particular the public performance of secrets, are playing such an important role today for individuals and societies alike? On the one hand, we seem to be driven by a growing desire to exhibit our lives on- and offline, sharing everything from shopping secrets to intimate glimpses of our private selves. On the other hand, our anxieties increase as we become aware of the sheer mass of personal data that is secretly harvested, stored and used on a large scale by states and corporations for purposes we do not know (and often consciously ignore), an insight fuelled by the major and minor information leaks of recent years, making sensitive data widely accessible and throwing global power relations out of balance.
This paradoxical situation can also be described in more economic terms: as secrets become more and more difficult to keep, they turn into a scarce commodity whose value we systematically deflate by advertising everything we want people to desire and consume in one way or another, from remote holiday resorts to our own life stories, as “secret/s”.Secrets do not simply exist as fixed entities, but rather in and through communication. They are never just the classified document or the personal experience you don’t want anyone to know about. They consist of the communicative acts of selectively sharing information with others, of limiting or granting access to it. And they are communicated as stories. What provokes the outcry around data leaks or the public revelation of private secrets is the stories they trigger or bring to light. Sharing a secret means telling a story – and secrets you don’t share are stories that you tell yourself instead (and that your body will blunder out sooner or later).
Thus, secrets function as a mechanism for creating and structuring relations between individuals and groups, between those who are included in or excluded from certain information. They come into being with the other in mind, organizing how we are, or are not, together. Secret codes, sites, or rituals have always been used as media that creates and communicates difference within and between communities. Thus, looking at the dynamics of keeping or sharing secrets today sheds light on the ways in which our social, economic, and political landscapes are created and maintained, or destabilized and reconfigured. All Our Secrets looks at the performativity of secrets, at how we narrate (= make) our past, present, and future by the way we deal with and in our secrets, how we make them travel in time and space.
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