Facing the sea, arms outstretched, Tadeusz Kantor creating his “panoramic happening of the sea” near Osiek on 23 August 1967. The picture of this ‘maritime concert’ by the Polish protest artist is loaded with symbols and metaphors which doubtless reveal the wish to question the places and the methods of creation while proposing a new way of looking at Europe and its culture. Artists: Kosta Tonev (Bulgaria)
“Windows upon Oceans” is a series of events put together by the 5 members of the ARTVENTURE – Visual Art Network. The idea feeding the project is to perceive European space from its coastline, to conceive Europe and its cultural plurality starting from its seas and its boundary regions. (Michel Roux). Envisaging a new topology of our continent brought us to reflect on the artistic situations that result from it as the question of the limits of contemporary creation (Paul Ardenne).
With “Windows upon Oceans” our aim is to put in question the ideal city which, according to Plato, should be situated a long way from the sea and turn its back on those who come from the coast. Our approach attempts to contest this ideal space, this privileged place, the metropolis which develops sometimes in such a way that it obscures the presence of surrounding towns and their wonderful riches.
Our objective is to offer the public a cartographic concept based on projects imagined by exhibition curators and artists from unknown, unloved, scorned and even disreputable regions... We realized that the artistic creation taking place on the margins of the centralizing and globalizing system affecting a large part of cultural structures is far from lacking in interest. Moreover, this exclusion from the mainstream enabled some artists to develop a critical approach and alternative reflections. To take account of these differences is to really confront “something else”; it involves accepting to put our own values to the test.
“Windows upon Oceans” is the result of research work carried out through prospection journeys and meetings with cultural operators along our European coastline. From the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean, via the Black Sea. But not only. The activities of the network reserved a special place for artists, exhibition curators and art critics who envisage artistic creation as a means of surpassing, of reaching out beyond.
In fact, we took a long look at the question of frontiers – boundary spaces, minority territories, zones of invasion, places of exchange and conflict, the history of migrations. The seas, for us, through their swell and constant ebb and flow, are reminders of the movements of artistic mobility and the agitation in contemporary creation which unceasingly question our world and confront the challenge of innovation.
A frontier, both emblematic and symbolic as it was, the Berlin Wall was doubtless the most relevant illustration of the preoccupations we have just mentioned. 20 years after its fall, can we really affirm that all the mental, cultural, spiritual, social, economic frontiers, have all fallen too? How do the generations of artists who lived at the time of the wall and those who came ‘after’ experience, neglect or deal with these situations?
Beyond any nostalgic commemoration, there is the need to reflect on our society, our daily life, our systems of thought, of government and their capability or incapability of confronting and handling life after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Dimitri Konstantinidis
apollonia
Ibro Hasanovic (Bosnia-Herzegovina)
Anila Rubiku (Albania)
Artur Klinov (Balarus)
Aneta Grzeszykowska & Jan Smaga (Poland)
Michael Bielicky (Czech Republic)
IRWIN (Slovenia)
