The invisible generation (art project)
Encyclopedia
The Invisible Generation was a contemporary art project conceived by artist Per Hüttner
and Curator Daniele Balit and organized by Vision Forum
and created new meeting places between art and its audiences. A great number of projects were realized in Melbourne
, Shenzhen
, Beijing
and Kiev
in 2009-2010. For each city the program and artist list was totally new. No, project was ever repeated twice. The project always allowed the audience to meet art in new and unexpected situations and played with or confused the audiences’ expectations about what art is, where it normally appears and what shape it should take.
Most projects were realized in contexts where the audience does not necessarily expect to find artwork. In the metro (Dinu Li, Per Hüttner), in a newspaper office (Yan Jun), on a public square (Natasha Rosling) or even contained as a story in the mind of a person in a shop (Good TV). In other instances the project played with the perceived immutability of the artwork. The audience was asked to actively create or re-create artwork (The Anti-Hospital), remove or destroy drawings (Jean-François Robardet), bring books to be changed (Private Contractors) or in some cases it was disguised as an informative poster, graffity or political propaganda (Huang Xiaopeng, Per Hüttner).
The inspiration and title is taken from a text by William S. Burroughs
where he describes a series of situation where a tape recorder is used to create new forms of meeting between people and new forms of engagement with the media.
For the period of the exhibition the Anti-Hospital also coordinated a series of events, performances, actions, workshops and ways of disseminating the instructions through the media and the urban space of Melbourne including, local artists, students and a program on the screen and LEDs at Federation Square. This included the controversial project “Young Dictators” conceived and realized by Per Hüttner with two local students. The three put up 2000 copies of A4 sized posters around the city showing images of dictators such as Adolf Hitler
, Saddam Hussein
and Joseph Stalin
as children with the text “Have you seen this child? Please contact 0432 027 925” (Hüttner’s mobile number).
created a choreography of corruption and guilt on the Shenzhen underground provoking fear in the audience and laying bare how deep inside the psyches of its citizens a totalitarian government can reach. Neno Belchev designed a portable zebra crossings to facilitate jaywalking
, a passion shared by the Chinese and Bulgarians
.
day without internet. The two has since launched a range of events in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong. Other events included Yan Jun’s sonic material slipped into the desk drawers at Beijing Youth Weekly editorial office and interviews from the same newspaper that were replayed and perverted over 6 weeks. Good TV collected memories of images that had been lost for different reasons. collection of lost images retold by storytellers in their everyday life in the Wudaoying Hutong (五道营胡同). The Beijing context and the proximity to the centre of political power allowed “This Image Is No More” to develop another layer of interpretation which had been lacking in its realization in Europe. Both Natasha Rosling and Yang Zhifei created versions of their projects from Shenzhen in Beijing. Especially the giant white pillow carried through the streets the Chinese capital to mirrored its grandiose buildings in ways that also inspired interesting reactions among the unassuming audience.
and art in public spaces and included speakers such as Olesya Turkina, Olav Westphalen and Karen MacDonald. In conjunction with this a group of students from Kungliga Konsthögskolan in Stockholm
made a series of improvised performances at Les Kurbas’ Theater Center. A large part of the project took place during the swine flu
epidemic in Ukraine all public theatre events were stopped and schools closed giving the whole event a very special flavour.
The actual project was scheduled to be realized in April 2010, but had to be cancelled due to the volcanic ash cloud that prevented air travel in Europe at the given time and only web-performances were undertaken. The project was realized 19 june and 2–4 July 2010 and was co-curated by Per Hüttner and Yulia Usova. The project saw a meeting between artists from China, Western Europe and Ukraine. Rumours claim that artists met with great problems with local authorities including arrests, theft by undercover policemen and that the artists had to bribe officials to be able to leave the country.
, Hu Xiangqian, Josefin Wikström and Sarah Kim, Good TV, Yan Jun, Oksana Chepelyk, Oksana Plysyuk, Huang Xiaopeng, Oleg Chorny and Gena Khmaruk, Alexander Kokhanovsky, Jean-François Robardet, Klas Eriksson, Gang Don, TanzLaboratorium, PRIVATE CONTRACTORS (Olav Westphalen and Per Hüttner), Pauline Curnier Jardin and Volodymyr Karashevskyi.
, Etienne Cliquet, Gerrie van Noord, Hristina Ivanoska , Jean-Francois Robardet, Karen MacDonald, Kent Hanssen, Kylie Wilkinson, Natalia Kamia, Natalie Thomas, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Per Hüttner, Riccardo Benassi, Rik Bas Backer, Samon Takahashi , Seth Cluett, Veronica Kent and Sean Peoples, Yan Jun, James Webb, The Grossi Maglioni Magic Duo, Harriet Kate Morgan/Joint Hassles, USERNAME and Jon Phillips.
The following people have also participated in the various programs and events of the TIG in Melbourne: Amy Johannes, Kay Abude, Laura Whitfield, Ann Fuata, Jethro Harcourt, Lisa Imai, Alesh Macak, Pip Ryan, Sherry McLane Alejos, Kellie Wells, Nick Tammens, Sarah Haywood, Natalie Thomas, Kylie Wilkinson, Alex Rizkalla and Julie Davies..
Per Hüttner
Per Hüttner is a Swedish visual artist who lives and works in Paris, France. He graduated from Konsthögskolan in Stockholm 1993. He also studied at Hochschule der Künste in Berlin 1991-1992. He is mostly known for his photographic work and for his interactive, changing and travelling exhibition...
and Curator Daniele Balit and organized by Vision Forum
Vision Forum (art organisation)
Vision Forum is an organisation which organises contemporary art events that transgresses the boundaries between performance, exhibition, workshops and education...
and created new meeting places between art and its audiences. A great number of projects were realized in Melbourne
Melbourne
Melbourne is the capital and most populous city in the state of Victoria, and the second most populous city in Australia. The Melbourne City Centre is the hub of the greater metropolitan area and the Census statistical division—of which "Melbourne" is the common name. As of June 2009, the greater...
, Shenzhen
Shenzhen
Shenzhen is a major city in the south of Southern China's Guangdong Province, situated immediately north of Hong Kong. The area became China's first—and one of the most successful—Special Economic Zones...
, Beijing
Beijing
Beijing , also known as Peking , is the capital of the People's Republic of China and one of the most populous cities in the world, with a population of 19,612,368 as of 2010. The city is the country's political, cultural, and educational center, and home to the headquarters for most of China's...
and Kiev
Kiev
Kiev or Kyiv is the capital and the largest city of Ukraine, located in the north central part of the country on the Dnieper River. The population as of the 2001 census was 2,611,300. However, higher numbers have been cited in the press....
in 2009-2010. For each city the program and artist list was totally new. No, project was ever repeated twice. The project always allowed the audience to meet art in new and unexpected situations and played with or confused the audiences’ expectations about what art is, where it normally appears and what shape it should take.
Most projects were realized in contexts where the audience does not necessarily expect to find artwork. In the metro (Dinu Li, Per Hüttner), in a newspaper office (Yan Jun), on a public square (Natasha Rosling) or even contained as a story in the mind of a person in a shop (Good TV). In other instances the project played with the perceived immutability of the artwork. The audience was asked to actively create or re-create artwork (The Anti-Hospital), remove or destroy drawings (Jean-François Robardet), bring books to be changed (Private Contractors) or in some cases it was disguised as an informative poster, graffity or political propaganda (Huang Xiaopeng, Per Hüttner).
The inspiration and title is taken from a text by William S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...
where he describes a series of situation where a tape recorder is used to create new forms of meeting between people and new forms of engagement with the media.
Melbourne, September 2009
The first part of The Invisible Generation opened to the public in Australia in September 2009. The presentation was co-curated by Hüttner and Balit. It was introduced at the Margaret Lawrence Gallery which was also the starting point for a number of interventions in the public space of the city. In the gallery were two major installations presented: Do Not Go Gentle Court by Per Hüttner and Polka Dot by French artist Mark Geffriaud. The two works redefine the gallery experience through reflections on the fabric of space and time. Being situated at the boundaries between installation and performance, they delineated a space that was the starting point for the Anti-Hospital, an open-ended and evolving platform which formed the core of the project. The Anti-Hospital was designed by Melbourne-based collective Greatest Hits and focused around a collection of artistic documents providing instructions that were formulated as possible actions, performances, temporary artworks, objects and social situations, scores and sonic interventions proposed by absent artists and realized by local artists, non-artists and visitors to the gallery. Greatest Hits created a dozen videos that enacted, played with and read out the instructions and together created a sort of manual to aid and inspire the visitor to relate to them. Many instructions were interpreted, primarily by local artists while the exhibition was open to the public.For the period of the exhibition the Anti-Hospital also coordinated a series of events, performances, actions, workshops and ways of disseminating the instructions through the media and the urban space of Melbourne including, local artists, students and a program on the screen and LEDs at Federation Square. This included the controversial project “Young Dictators” conceived and realized by Per Hüttner with two local students. The three put up 2000 copies of A4 sized posters around the city showing images of dictators such as Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
, Saddam Hussein
Saddam Hussein
Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti was the fifth President of Iraq, serving in this capacity from 16 July 1979 until 9 April 2003...
and Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
as children with the text “Have you seen this child? Please contact 0432 027 925” (Hüttner’s mobile number).
Shenzhen October 2009
Where the presentation in Melbourne focused on the relationship between suspended instructions in the gallery and interventions in the public space, the project in Shenzhen consisted mostly of unannounced performances in the public space and hosted by the contemporary art museum OCAT. The shift in political, economical, social and architectural context also meant the dynamics of the project changed greatly and made the participation of the local audience more difficult to achieve, but all the more successful on the occasions where it happened. Presentations included carnivalesque costumes appearing in public space as temporary and wearable architectural elements by Natasha Rosling. Yang Zhifei carried a giant white pillow through the streets of the city and she let an army of people sleep in public spaces, each with a normally sized pillow under their head. She also organized a dream workshop to compare the dreams of the Chinese with those of the Dutch. Dinu LiDinu Li
Born in Hong Kong, China, Dinu Li is an artist currently living and working in Manchester, UK. His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, including the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, the 3rd Bucharest Biennale in 2008; The Map: Navigating the Present at Bildmuseet, Umeå,...
created a choreography of corruption and guilt on the Shenzhen underground provoking fear in the audience and laying bare how deep inside the psyches of its citizens a totalitarian government can reach. Neno Belchev designed a portable zebra crossings to facilitate jaywalking
Jaywalking
Jaywalking is an informal term commonly used in North America to refer to illegal or reckless pedestrian crossing of a roadway. Examples include a pedestrian crossing between intersections without yielding to drivers and starting to cross a crosswalk at a signalized intersection without waiting...
, a passion shared by the Chinese and Bulgarians
Bulgarians
The Bulgarians are a South Slavic nation and ethnic group native to Bulgaria and neighbouring regions. Emigration has resulted in immigrant communities in a number of other countries.-History and ethnogenesis:...
.
Beijing July 2009 – July 2010
The events in Beijing took place over a whole year and culminated in a large presentation at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in June 2010 Presentations kicked off with summer 2009 with Jon Phillips and Matt Hope’s speaker event "Laoban Sound System" in conjunction with Ai Weiwei’sAi Weiwei
Ai Weiwei is a Chinese contemporary artist, active in sculpture, installation, architecture, curating, photography, film, and social, political and cultural criticism. Ai collaborated with Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron as the artistic consultant on the Beijing National Stadium for the 2008...
day without internet. The two has since launched a range of events in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong. Other events included Yan Jun’s sonic material slipped into the desk drawers at Beijing Youth Weekly editorial office and interviews from the same newspaper that were replayed and perverted over 6 weeks. Good TV collected memories of images that had been lost for different reasons. collection of lost images retold by storytellers in their everyday life in the Wudaoying Hutong (五道营胡同). The Beijing context and the proximity to the centre of political power allowed “This Image Is No More” to develop another layer of interpretation which had been lacking in its realization in Europe. Both Natasha Rosling and Yang Zhifei created versions of their projects from Shenzhen in Beijing. Especially the giant white pillow carried through the streets the Chinese capital to mirrored its grandiose buildings in ways that also inspired interesting reactions among the unassuming audience.
Kiev, November 2009 and July 2010
In November Yulia Usova and PAI organised a series of talks in Kiev that approached issues such as curationCuration
Curation may refer to:*Digital curation, the preservation and maintenance of digital assets*Sheer curation, a minimalist form of digital curationCuration may also be:*The work performed by a curator*Archiving, historical record keeping...
and art in public spaces and included speakers such as Olesya Turkina, Olav Westphalen and Karen MacDonald. In conjunction with this a group of students from Kungliga Konsthögskolan in Stockholm
Stockholm
Stockholm is the capital and the largest city of Sweden and constitutes the most populated urban area in Scandinavia. Stockholm is the most populous city in Sweden, with a population of 851,155 in the municipality , 1.37 million in the urban area , and around 2.1 million in the metropolitan area...
made a series of improvised performances at Les Kurbas’ Theater Center. A large part of the project took place during the swine flu
Swine flu
Swine influenza, also called pig influenza, swine flu, hog flu and pig flu, is an infection by any one of several types of swine influenza virus. Swine influenza virus or S-OIV is any strain of the influenza family of viruses that is endemic in pigs...
epidemic in Ukraine all public theatre events were stopped and schools closed giving the whole event a very special flavour.
The actual project was scheduled to be realized in April 2010, but had to be cancelled due to the volcanic ash cloud that prevented air travel in Europe at the given time and only web-performances were undertaken. The project was realized 19 june and 2–4 July 2010 and was co-curated by Per Hüttner and Yulia Usova. The project saw a meeting between artists from China, Western Europe and Ukraine. Rumours claim that artists met with great problems with local authorities including arrests, theft by undercover policemen and that the artists had to bribe officials to be able to leave the country.
Documentation and talks
Since most of the events in The Invisible Generation only had an unexpecting audience, the organizers present the documentation of the project in various art institutions around the world, including UCCA in Beijing and Norrköpings Konstmuseum in Sweden. Vision Forum has also published an extensive catalogue about The Invisible Generation in 2011. It was edited by Gerrie van Noord and includes all the original instructions presented in Melbourne. The publication also contains texts by Daniele Balit, Per Hüttner, Olav Westphalen and by van Noord where she reflects on the difficulty and necessity of mediating projects like The Invisible Generation..Participating Artists
Mark Geffriaud, Natasha Rosling Jon Phillips and Matt Hope, Neno Belchev, Yang Zhifei, Anne Klontz, Per Hüttner, Dinu LiDinu Li
Born in Hong Kong, China, Dinu Li is an artist currently living and working in Manchester, UK. His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, including the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, the 3rd Bucharest Biennale in 2008; The Map: Navigating the Present at Bildmuseet, Umeå,...
, Hu Xiangqian, Josefin Wikström and Sarah Kim, Good TV, Yan Jun, Oksana Chepelyk, Oksana Plysyuk, Huang Xiaopeng, Oleg Chorny and Gena Khmaruk, Alexander Kokhanovsky, Jean-François Robardet, Klas Eriksson, Gang Don, TanzLaboratorium, PRIVATE CONTRACTORS (Olav Westphalen and Per Hüttner), Pauline Curnier Jardin and Volodymyr Karashevskyi.
Participating artists in The Invisible Generation archive of instructions
A Constructed World, Åsa Ersmark, Anna Scalfi, Carlo Steiner, Chen Wei, Chi Wo Leung, Christophe Bruno, Dinu LiDinu Li
Born in Hong Kong, China, Dinu Li is an artist currently living and working in Manchester, UK. His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, including the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, the 3rd Bucharest Biennale in 2008; The Map: Navigating the Present at Bildmuseet, Umeå,...
, Etienne Cliquet, Gerrie van Noord, Hristina Ivanoska , Jean-Francois Robardet, Karen MacDonald, Kent Hanssen, Kylie Wilkinson, Natalia Kamia, Natalie Thomas, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Per Hüttner, Riccardo Benassi, Rik Bas Backer, Samon Takahashi , Seth Cluett, Veronica Kent and Sean Peoples, Yan Jun, James Webb, The Grossi Maglioni Magic Duo, Harriet Kate Morgan/Joint Hassles, USERNAME and Jon Phillips.
The following people have also participated in the various programs and events of the TIG in Melbourne: Amy Johannes, Kay Abude, Laura Whitfield, Ann Fuata, Jethro Harcourt, Lisa Imai, Alesh Macak, Pip Ryan, Sherry McLane Alejos, Kellie Wells, Nick Tammens, Sarah Haywood, Natalie Thomas, Kylie Wilkinson, Alex Rizkalla and Julie Davies..