Oliver Ressler. media façade

09.04.2015 - 30.04.2015

Muzej Suvremene Umjetnosti, Zagreb / Hrvatska

Oliver Ressler’s work on MSU’s media façade at first sight appears as though it is not using the full possibilities of the three gigantic electronic screens that cover the building’s façade. While a media façade is generally used for technically more complex projects, Ressler’s three-channel site-specific work seems to negate the nature of the medium by presenting three static texts on the façade’s three parts.

Two of the texts are slogans, coined in specific historical contexts, but on the facade a general audience will more likely read it in relation to the current political and economic difficulties in European Union’s newest member state....

The slogan “elections are a con” was coined in May 1968 in Paris. It seems to have regained a special importance during these times of permanent economic crisis, in which the system of representative democracy has become less and less responsive to the interests of the electorate, and is instead primarily oriented to the interests of banks, corporations and the rich. Walden Bello notes that Western democracy is an ideal situation to ensure the continuance of the elites’ power, because it allows elites to contest each other, while at the same time shutting out the dispossessed, the impoverished and workers, while paradoxically offering them the illusion of taking part in the political process.* In this system, elections have transformed into a meaningless ritual, while self-appointed political and economic elites make the real decisions away from public debates.

The slogan “property is theft” comes from a book by French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon from 1840. Proudhon opposed unused land being regarded as property, believing that land can only be rightfully possessed by use, while he considered the result of an individual's labor a legitimate form of property. Today’s “accumulation by dispossession”, a form of appropriation that involves not primarily the generation of wealth but rather taking possession of existing wealth, usually from the poor or the public sector, makes this slogan a perfect candidate for re-use in the context of global capitalism.

The third text “block or slow power” invites people to become active and to engage in social movements attempting to stop anti-democratic tendencies directed against people’s lives.

[Quelle: Einladung]