This site is under Revolution
MMOMA Moscow
Strategic Project from the 6th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art
Gramsci said: “We resist when we recognize the arbitrary foundations of a rule”. But what could be the virtual shape of resistance in times of digital oligarchies? How can we protest against biased systems and unfair monitoring? What could be considered violence in digital terms? Our voices seem deprived of resonance in the virtual realm, consumed and diluted in the never-ending thread of images and data. We have become only visitors of our own experiences and data providers for corporations. But, although the aggressions in the digital sphere are obvious, they remain disguised under discourses of democratization, protection and free access to information.
To fight against the oppressive yet fluid and immaterial system, “This site is under Revolution” looks for tools of empowerment, mechanisms of distraction, and schemes to regain agency. It focuses on how artists disentangle the social, cultural, historical, gendered implications of identity in the post-digital society, and explore the virtual sphere as the terrain to trigger civil transgression.
Through a selection of works that move across media – from sound to performance, from digital to print – the exhibition explores the power of minimal gestures to critique and challenge uneven ways of representation that perpetuate dominant conventions. The artists embrace their inherent vulnerability, subverting the discourse of protection and paternalism, and to transform it into political agency. They adamantly depict the un-representedness to overturn the current situation of partisanship and distrust, whether by means of speculation, by delving into the politics of knowledge dissemination, or by decoding and confronting the viewer with the tacit rules that generate structures of inclusion and exclusion.
This site is under Revolution transforms the museum into an agent, and the exhibition into a live scenario - expanding its limits with discursive events such as workshops, discussions and performances, both online and offline. The exhibition takes place at MMOMA at the Gogolevsky Boulevard, where The Decemberist planned their uprising against the Tsar, continues in the digital realm through the platform CosmosCarl.co.uk, and uses the digital vocabulary to plot strategies of post-digital resistance on its vernacular.
In this way, it delves into the politics and poetics of representation and identity in the post-digital society. Thus facilitating new ways of engaging with our realities beyond the Eurocentric, accelerated views of the present, and looking at them refracted through prisms of disparity, empowerment, and agency.