Graduale 16: No New Kind of Duck – 7 ways of carving out space for conflicting realities

About

This is an exhibition by Ralf Baecker, Lizza May David, Jeremiah Day, Bjoern Erlach, Azin Feizabadi, Nuria Núñez Hierro and Alex Martinis Roe, curated by Jan Verwoert. It is the Graduale, the biannual showcase of the Graduate School programme at the Berlin University of the Arts.

No New Kind of Duck is about art and music that talk back to reality. It’s an exhibition by artists and composers who seek to get their hands into the way things work, so as to carve out spaces to which we could go and grasp how things can be done differently.

Making such a claim is to raise the stakes when the chips are low. Smart people today tell you that art and life alike are about knowing to bluff. So we might as well get our decoy ducks in a row and have the highest bidder pay for shooting them. Le cynique, c’est chic. Agreed, things look bleak on the political front too: What good is creative thinking when power bluntly asserts its capacitiy to shape the world in its image? In 2004, an aide to Bush Jr. told journalist Ron Suskind: “We’re an empire now and when we act, we create our own reality (…) and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” If that were still true, whoever put a big duck on the pond first, ruled the waters.

It’s hard to argue with bluntness. That doesn’t mean one had to accept imposed realities, and be stuck with studies. The trick is to slip behind the back of what people treat as established fact. One may need to sidestep the tyranny of the contemporary and delve into the depths of lived memory where the ghosts of traumatic pasts are as alive and active as the spirit of political change. In any case, the challenge is to pry open the cracks in the real, and reach down to the level below, where things are still volatile, hence open to change, so codes may melt into music, and conflicting forces can be brought to bear.

This is what the artists and composers in No New Kind of Duck set out to do. The show aligns the urgency of research into the deep archive of lived politics with a surrealist drive towards crafting different forms of life and art, on the edges of reality.

The event is co-funded by the Einstein Foundation Berlin.