Tentura and Antitentura

The exhibition Tentura and Antitentura aims to think further on radical incomplete as a space of imagination. It takes its title from “Kin-dza-dza!”, a 1986 made Soviet sci-fi dystopian black comedy cult film. In the idiosyncratic Plukanian language devised of the film “Tentura and Antitentura” names the opposite parts of the Universe. Some planets and galaxies exist in Tentura and some (including Earth) in Antitentura. The dialectical projection of the world in Kin-dza-dza! proposes an ironic view about the contradictions inherent in what is seen as correct political dispositions.

The crises of living structures in different fields asks for a radical positioning and an ability to critique that builds itself on unlearning and relearning, making mistakes rather than generating truths; thus facing the field of critique itself as a radical incomplete. Radical incompleteness foresees contradictions in facts and marks an open space to imagine and speculate.

As an artistic position, it implies a conceptual opposition that may materialize in different forms, methods and languages. The invited artists for Tentura and Antitentura devise their artistic languages in film, photography and installation through repeated visits to the space of radical incomplete where they take their positions of critique. They invite us to unlearn correct languages of political to reach a poetics of critical.

Susanne M. Winterling’s minimal and powerful Untitled (the artist as Torquato Tasso), 2009 performs a portrait of 16th century Italian writer and thinker Torquato Tasso as a reluctant harlequin, underlining a poetics that comes through negative capability.

In her work, Natalie Czech treats the text as an image and draws our attention to indefinite number of layers in printed material, an incomplete reading performing itself in repetition. Languages of minorities plays an important role for Bouchra Khalili. In Speeches I (2012) her narrators empower their mostly oral, even unwritten dialects by reciting the texts of Malcolm X, Abdelkrim El Khattabi and Édouard Glissant.

Ahmet Ögut filmed Oscar William Sam on 12th of November 2011 in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park during Occupy Wall Street protests. In an ironic attempt to identify individuals with the way used by law enforcement services and military on the camp site, Ögut questions where the vulnerable thin line between power and impotence lies.

Yorgos Sapountzis speculates on a potentiality that lies in the negative in his empty, abandoned site of performance in his sculptural installation Empty Shelves Black News (2012) alluding to a moment of crisis.

The idea of radical incomplete is one of the main drives in the collective work of Ruanne Abou-Rahme and Basel Abbas thinking on the role of artist and artistic work in the current context of Palestine with the concern of producing an open universal commentary inspired by different histories and imaginaries.

Mariechen Danz imagines the process of unlearning as performance in the form a subtle object in Book I (Unlearning) 2012. Hers is a fundamental statement that can be both the beginning and the end of this cycle.