Susak expo 2014 biennale press release

In its quinary, decennial incarnation, the 5th Susak Expo Biennale positions itself confidently over a range of artistic presences/absences, practices/praxises and emergent politics of the truant or peripatetic actor in the expanded geographical and conceptual art(s) space, dropping perpendicular perspectives from this sui generis and never to be repeated artistic posture. In particular the “absences” here can, at times, be read problematically by the uniformed observer as an absence of audience, but as Wendy Beckett has written, “The absence of the viewer in post-internet, post-irony contemporary practices, ev/in/vasions of pre hoc hierarchies around cultural values and assumptions of artistic worth often congeals into a paradoxic gestalt that allows the artist (cis or trans pronouned) self to finally and fully attach to… [the] relational aesthetics.”

A shared oscillation between the nugatory, solipsistic act of making and its concomitant absence of superficial or “gaze-accessible” meaning or pragmatically physical public access binds together (sometimes disturbingly so) exhibiting artists Georgina Corrie, Janko Matic, Keran James, Cedric Christie, Petra Varl, Peter Seewasser, Alistair Gentry, Paul Sakoilsky, Daniel Devlin and Herzog Dellafiore in a determination to displace this lack, i.e. of intrusion by external forces, into a gustatory, domestic period of heimlich/unheimlich internal deflection that nonetheless finds external replication in a certain ephemeral outdoor monumentalitism that forces us to envision. This aforementioned oscillation can also act as a subversive vector even for effectively fictive and/or entirely absent persons, texts or acts, these being fastidiously included in the Expo Biennale’s modus operandi. A secondary inclutivity is Susak Expo Biennale’s tacit acknowledgement of La Biennale di Venezia’s debt to biennales such as Susak Expo Biennale, which proxy for the Biennale during its duoannular nonexistence and collectively form a crucial globular underwire and covert massaging function for the international art world’s straining emboinpoint. Underlining this crucial relationship between the Susak and Venice Biennales, many former exhibitors at Venice such as Jeremy Deller, Mike Nelson and Steve McQueen, plus forthcoming British Pavilion representative and former “YBA” artist Sarah Lucas are all not present at Susak this year.

Crucial to the Expo’s external performativities in this cycle is artist Cedric Christie’s famous “Metropolitan Picasso car” car, which for the 5th Susak Expo Biennale will convey and intersect with the con(temporary) artist Daniel Devlin and his roof-mounted (usually) small (here forcibly disturbing certainties of scale with its contradictory prodigious amplitude) mobile cart structure with a single wheel at the front and two supporting legs and two handles at the rear, resembling those similar carts used typically and vernacularly for carrying loads in building work or gardening but subversively repurposed for the Expo as a novel cargo of the modified but fundamentally, radically quotidian automobile structure. During the assemblage’s major transcontinental work of peregrination from London to Susak the duadic artists will enact the episodic, repeated bringing of the hybrid vehicle– or, from another perspective, the vehicle and its paradoxical load– to a halt and subsequently leaving it temporarily, typically in a “car park” or by the side of the road (a knowing reference to a common practice among the general public), sometimes adjacent to one of a series of art spaces at which official receptions have been solicited and– occasionally, speculatively, potentially– elicited. A certain reference to Heisenberg’s “Uncertainty Principal” can obviously be discerned in this fusion of Christie and Devlin’s divergent vehicular configurations of wheel(s) and chassis(es), and in the unknown and unresolved binaries of the artists’ intentions and the multiplying potential realities in which this inherently outdoor-enacted mobile modus both is and is not simultaneously accepted by the typically wall-defined art spaces under discussion. In Mali Losinj a meticulously planned impromptu brass band reception will coverage the “Police” car’s embarkation for Susak aboard a marine refuse conveyance vehicle, forming yet a third retinally provocative structure of stacked or nested transportative forms.

Vernissage and reception makes its sole occurrence twice, in house 600 on Saturday 31 May and Sunday 1 June. The included works– by the plein air, site specific inherencies of their making– have an ongoing relationship with the ongoing externalities of domestic structure and will therefore be on show exclusively outwith any internal space(s) throughout the summer season preceding autumn.