POSTCAPITAL ARCHIVE 1989 - 2001 (solo)

OVERVIEW

EXHIBITION SYNOPSIS

This exhibition is organized by Iberia Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China and Centro de Arte Tomás y Valiente, Fuenlabrada, Madrid, Spain (CEART).

Daniel García Andújar will present “Postcapital . Archive 1989 - 2001” at the Venice Biennale 2009. The project has been shown at Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart from 22 November 2008 to 18 January 2009, and will be part of the 53rd edition of the Venice Biennal.

The project—conceived, in equal measure, as multimedia installation, stage, open databank, and workshop—is founded on a digital archive comprised of over 250,000 documents (texts, audio files, videos, etc.) from the Internet compiled by the artist over the past ten years.

Postcapital revolves around the far-reaching changes having evolved worldwide in social, political, economic, and cultural realms over the last two decades, their watershed moments emblematized in the 1989 Fall of the Berlin Wall and the attacks on September 11, 2001. Here, Andújar views the developments subsequent to the “Fall of the Wall” not as aspects of postcommunism but rather of postcapitalism. Emerging here is the question as to what extent capitalist societies have changed in absence of their erstwhile counterparts and which new walls have been erected through the global politics following events of 1989 and 2001. The word ‘postcapital’ in English also denotes ‘financial capital’ and ‘capital city’. Thus, this project also touches on the reformulation of social forces in the process of urbanization in capitalist societies.