Seven Times Two or Three: on and beneath communication

Curated by Bart van der Heide and Binna Choi

Friday 13 June 2008 to Friday 20 June 2008

Private View: Friday 13 June 2008, 18:30PM to 20:30PM

A one-week long series of events featuring works and research by over 30 artists, designers, musicians and writers in the form of live performances, lectures, dialogues and appropriations.

Cubitt is pleased to host Seven Times Two or Three/on and beneath communication, an intense series of installations, presentations, performances and dialogues, taking place over a period of one week for no more than two or three hours a day. Developed in association with Electric Palm Tree, Seven Times Two or Three aims at challenging the dominant shape of contemporary culture where communication has regressed into one-sided, 24-hour public noise.

According to social research, one “spends 3.5 years of his/her live answering irrelevant emails”, while only 2 percent of all information raining down on us can be consciously processed. From this starting point, Seven Times Two or Three features presentations that explore today’s situation of overflowing public (private) information and its narrative of superficiality (with presentations by art critics and authors Jan Verwoert and Sven Lutticken), or, going a step further — Marcus Steinweg, Haegue Yang and Sung Hwan Kim — break through the ever-expanding verbal surface in order to generate a constructive state of miscommunication and dys-functional time. Together with artists such as Mariana Castello Deball and Wendelien van Oldenborgh, who approach the (neo-liberal) regime of time from an historical angle, Seven Times Two or Three aims to set out a playing field in which the transparency of communication is appropriated and subjected to alternatives.

Situating this week-long series of events at Cubitt, the gallery will feature a selection of historical and contemporary references, including works and retakes of works by artists Lawrence Weiner, Bernadette Corporation and Phillip Lai. The opening event will present a musical experiment by Amsterdam-based musicians Byungjun Kwon and Min Seok Kwon entitled Hypermetropia: a physical defect of vision causing an inability to focus on near objects. The seven day running series will complete with a screening of the film Tokyo Story (1953) by Yasujiro Ozu, which depicts post-war Japan’s modern life in a leisurely tempo, and a performance by Pil and Galia Kollectiv entitled Better Future-quad-shaped.

Workshop with Manuel Raeder “In the Land of the Blind the One-eyed Man is King”

Monday 16 June, 4-6 pm

On Monday June 16, renowned graphic designer and conceptual thinker Manuel Raeder will host a public workshop on ‘folding narratives’. Known for his collaborations with the fashion label BLESS and for numerous institutional interventions and artist collaborations, Raeder will give the construction of narrative a physical shape. The outcomes of the workshop will join the other works in the gallery.