Lara Favaretto
Tutti gìu per terra (We all fall down), 2004
Confetti, Industrial fans. Dimensions variable
Installation view, Sharjah Art Foundation
Private Collection, Vancouver
Courtesy the artist and Galleria Franco Noero, Turin
Peter Coffin
Untitled, 2008
10,4 m x 5,5 m (Length times width)
Conveyor track, ballons
Courtesy the artist
© Peter Coffin, 2008
Infinite Test: exhibition at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt ‘Infinite Test’ – Exhibition at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt focuses on individual’s situation in today’s society without boundaries. June 5 – September 7, 2014.]]>
Source: Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt
The credo of today’s society without boundaries reads “ever faster, ever higher, ever further.” In the early twenty-first century, man, oscillating between euphoria and depression, finds himself confronted with the promising opportunities of a global and virtual world as well as the challenge to constantly improve, optimize, and shape his life more efficiently.
Based on works by eighteen contemporary artists such as Maurizio Cattelan, Peter Coffin, Judith Hopf, Andrea Fraser, Claire Fontaine, Alicja Kwade, Ryan Trecartin, and Daniel Richter, “Infinite Test” unfolds an image of a present-day world with the individual at its center. The works on display are not aimed at visualizing the contents of the eponymous epochal novel “Infinite Jest” by David Foster Wallace. The show rather explores the various demands confronting today’s individual, in which the modes of resistance and the contradictions of a reality often described as lacking any alternative make themselves felt.
Set in the near future, Wallace’s novel seismographically records possible results and consequences of an event and fun society that presents itself as a performance-oriented society at the same time. The works of art assembled for the presentation of the same name in the Schirn reveal how the present circumstances’ consequences and excesses make man revolve around himself almost without end. Which methods and ways do we find or invent to continually optimize and perfect ourselves in order to fulfil the requirements of modern society? The artworks’ subjects span from addiction in its various forms, the localization of the self, depression, and the emptying of meaning to absurdity, irrationality, and virtually deadly irony. Visually and conceptually, the presented works shed light on the meaning of the term “hysterical realism” which has been coined for a certain kind of literature some years ago.
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