Not yet Night

co-ordinated by Babak Ghazi
Saturday 18th September 2004, 6pm—late

with Johanna Billing, Aline bouvy & John Gillis, Lisa Castagner, Kim Coleman, Babak Ghazi, Gareth Jones, No bra, Susanne Oberbeck, Taytographies

We live by measured time. Not-yet is a state of anticipation...

Joachim-Ernst Berendt contrasts ‘objective’ time with ‘lived’ or‘subjective’, which ‘is the personal time of each individual, passing by much too fast during moments of bliss and much too slowly in the hour of suffering.’ Indeed, ‘clocks have to do with a lack of freedom’. How can we shape our own time?

We shape the world through our work. Art is an active mediation of the present. Duchamp’s act of choosing demonstrated the ‘act of mediation as a key artistic element, and it is the mediation that he puts into play himself’ (Fia Backstrom in conversation with Bettina Funcke). He took care of the way his work was photographed, written about and where it was published.

At the conclusion of his talk last year at Cubitt Gallery Stephan Dillemuth made the comment that we should kill the pope and baptise ourselves. I asked him what he meant and he used Cubitt as an example. He was referring to the idea that as an artist-run gallery space and studio complex Cubitt was independently organised and by extension, self-legitimising.

Self-institution comes from the refusal to be isolated and the negation of traditional roles. Not yet night comes from my shared desire for independence. And to see whether it can elicit some commitment. From myself and from others.

It is an invitation to artists who consider other subjectivities, new relationships, and who do not fall into a straightforward idea of utopianism, although utopianism is at the heart of it. Utopianism that plays out its internal contradictions. That lives in the imagination and its materialisations.