Kaloki NyamaiOSTRALE Biennale O1903.07. - 01.09.2019
Dresden

Pure nostalgia? Isms are mostly used as dogmas, juxtapositions, concepts of art, social values. Always produced by humans, they are also demarcations from other world views. Despite this, or precisely because of this power of the individual spirit and the collective bond, they are also regarded as a new value perceived for „freedom“.

The subject and collective perception are inseparable from ongoing discourses in art as well. Here, too, the new media increasingly allow the boundaries to be tested. While digital transformation and virtual reality are increasingly blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction, traditional „isms“ are being used again to support, defend and stabilise our values and world view.

What is art, what can art do and, in particular, what is art allowed to do?

Should we reset, reset, look at attitudes and attitudes to life anew, use ism as a discussion and attitude of mind, direct the expanded concept of art as a universal determination of human creativity to all areas of life-world reality „ism“?

Concepts, social movements and phenomena such as ideologism, terrorism, territorialism, naturalism, feminism, animism, consumerism and dystopism are examined, questioned and reflected upon in the artworks selected by the curators for the exhibition. Each artist has a different approach and perspective and often connects with more than one of the above themes at a time.

WomanIsm is one of the core themes in this context, which will be further explored in 2019-2020 and significantly supported by the TURN Fund of the German Federal Cultural Foundation. In this context, artists from Germany and Africa will jointly explore the situation of women and women’s rights through artistic collaboration, under the direction of curator Syowia Kyambi (Kenya).

The Artist in Residence programme of the OSTRALE enables the participating artists to work together on cooperative artistic projects in Dresden, to exchange ideas and experiences, to develop and realise concepts for cooperative artworks.

In addition, during the build-up phase of the exhibitions, artists and performers from Hong Kong, Malta, South Korea, Israel, Indonesia, Hungary, Austria, Italy, Turkey, Japan, China, Portugal, Spain, Russia, and others were invited to develop and build their works on site.