Artist Tony Cokes will be reading extracts from the book The Vienna Guide, 2018
published by saxpublishers
Friday, 14th September 2018, 6 pm
in conjunction with
Could you visit me in dreams?
DARREN BADER, NOAH BARKER,
TONY COKES, NIK GEENE, MICHÈLE GRAF
& SELINA GRÜTER, GILI TAL
14. SEPTEMBER 2018 - 13. OCTOBER 2018
after „travel notes“ compiled and edited by Tony Cokes
curated by Attilia Fattori Franchini
Opening: Thursday 13th September 2018, 6 – 9 pm
—
If you need souvenirs, it might be better to order them over the weekend internet – from your brightly lit home – your cubicle, or your “personal” node in the surveilled networks of global capital. Those protocols are de-selected, temporarily suspended here.
No video, no photography, no recording, no clocks, no fucking selfies
to mark your presence / absence here, or to circulate to others.
There is nothing to exchange, to distract from this minimal, grandiose, real-time, gorgeous, social illusion!
Anyone you might want to be here with you, but is not here now will have to hear your mistaken memories, your rumors, your lies, your silences.
All narration must be later, at a discreet distance. There is no space or time for that – those stories now.
Many here are strangers, like me.
Don’t forget to go home. (If you have a home.)
In a foreign place with non-native people you feel totally safe, like you’re in the future.
In a new, other Vienna.
T.C.
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The exhibition is conceptually built upon ‘travel notes” compiled and edited on the occasion by artist Tony Cokes. Adopting the point of view of the flaneur, Cokes creates a speculative image of Vienna by appropriating and meshing non-art, historical figures, touristic clichés and club nights, all entwined in technological commentary. This distant gaze – Cokes hasn’t visited Vienna in the last 20 years – facilitates an aerial view of the complexities and unique traits that characterizes it.
Rather than offering a historical or direct feedback over a city, the exhibition proposes to approach Vienna – and any urban site- as a discursive platform for future possibilities and identities. It comprises artistic positions that favour and reflect over complex social, political and economic dynamics present in the everyday whilst flirting with the imaginative context they are called to inhabit.