What is positive? Why?

Opening 6.9.2006, 19 pm

artists: Lise Autogena, Yona Friedman, Marko Lulic, Ioana Nemes, Maria Pask, Marjetica Potrc, Oliver Ressler, Jun Yang

Curators: Hilde de Bruijn and Gavin Wade

Design: goodwill

Publisher: Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna, in collaboration with Revolver – Archiv für Aktuelle Kunst

What is positive? Why?

Strategic Questions – Platform 06

Strategic Questions

What is positive? Why? is the 20th publication within Strategic Questions – 40 projects in 40 publications, an ongoing project by artist-curator Gavin Wade to develop 40 projects in response to 40 questions written by R. Buckminster Fuller. Each project tackles one question and is an artwork or a combination of artworks that are developed in relation to 40 different publication scenarios. The strategic questions were written by Buckminster Fuller as part of his statement Design Strategy (1966). It is Fuller's proposition that to achieve total success for all humanity for ever all interested parties must agree upon the answers to these strategic questions before they can successfully combine their efforts.

Strategic Questions: Platform 06

Strategic Questions: Platform 06 represents the half way stage of the project presenting the first 20 publications of the series including the new bookwork What is positive? Why?, and will be presented at Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna and De Appel, Amsterdam. Platform 06 is co-curated by Gavin Wade and Hilde de Bruijn.

As with former presentations within Strategic Questions the exhibition structures at both venues are unique in relation to both site and the particular question, and will incorporate different functions of display, reading, dialogue and reflection. At both venues the design will play in a different way with the notion of the perfect equilibrium: in Vienna Ioana Nemes’ ‘positive/negative ring’ will function as a starting point to reorganise the Kunsthalle’s exhibition system. In Amsterdam Fuller’s Vector Equilibrium system, which is the strongest structure set around a point of absolute equilibrium, is sliced in half to present the first half of the 40 questions. Another repeating element, suggested by Marjetica Potrč, one of the contributors to the new book, is the use of pattern – “not understood as decoration, but as 'organ', a pro-active and necessary link between a singular being and the world” (Potrč).

What is positive? Why?

For Fuller’s 10th question What is positive? Why? eight artists have delivered an interconnected set of answers to being positive, living positive, traveling positive, playing positive, planning positive, evaluating positive, thinking positive and seeing the world from a dogs perspective. At the point of perfect equilibrium What is positive? Why? journeys from blue sky thinking to imagining a self organised democracy that works.

www.strategicquestions.org

Opening and book launch at Kunsthalle Exnergasse: 6.9. 2006, 7 pm

Exhibition dates: 7.9. – 7.10. 2006, Tue-Fr 2 pm – 7 pm, Sat 10 am – 1 pm

Second venue: De Appel, Amsterdam: opening 16.9.2006