True Truth About the Nearly Real
With the forfeiture of master narratives, society and art have largely lost the possibility to take unambiguous ethical, political, but also aesthetic positions. New framings, representative orders, shifts in cultural, political and scientific paradigms challenge our concepts of identity, reality and ethics. But how and in what way do our realities break down? What new decipherments are necessary to understand the world? And how can these starting points be the beginning or result of an artistic process?
The 4th International Summer Academy considered such questions by focussing on the act of perception itself: On the one hand, it investigated the concept of fake as a means of questioning traditional notions of biography, reliability of perception, and quality of representations as intersubjective designations. What “is” that screen upon which we look, and how does this screen affect our gaze?
On the other hand, the notion of perception implies the question of perspective and spectatorship. In what ways have spectatorial positions been reorganized by the advent of new media and political agendas – as manipulation as much as critical stance? And has the spectator renewed his or her own perspective in a comparable way? It seems that aesthetics today is no longer a matter of organizing form and content, but rather a matter of uncovering ideological perspective – as fake, “truth,” experience, adventure, spectator, process, institution, politics, or simply: identity.
In eight “formations,” participants were invited to develop their own maps within a grid of lectures, working groups, sessions, performances, and various forms of work and communication. Each formation had an internationally recognized artist and theorist as host, who in turn has invited his or her own hosting partner.
The Title „True Truth about the Nearly Real“ is a commission work by Tim Etchells (Forced Entertainment)
A project by Künstlerhaus Mousonturm
In cooperation with: Institute for Applied Theatre Science / University of Giessen, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Centre for Performance Research, Janus, Kunstencentrum Vooruit, Ghent, Rotterdamse Schouwburg
