13—28.05.2022
My Goals Are Bigger Than Yours: Exhibition
My goals are bigger than yours.
After probing the depths of the gig economy, the precarious exhibition “My goals are bigger than yours” is finally visible in its complete form.
How can the creative entrepreneur survive in a world of excessive competition and underpaid labour? How does business ethics (neoliberal ethics in particular) relate to the figure of the artist/designer? How does this change her habits or goals? How do artists respond to these challenges?
The exhibition wants to analyse the consequences of neoliberal policies on the individuals, and especially on the so-called “creatives”, meaning the broad range of (mostly) freelance workers operating in the fields of art and design. While the competition in the art field becomes more and more fierce, with increasingly scarce resources for the producers, the “creatives” find themselves in precarious social and economic conditions. We, as artists and designers, spend thousand of euros on our education and professional development, study complex theoretical issues and try to be engaged in “artistic research” — among other things — but at the same time our precarity seems more often than not to be bracketed and set aside — even though the conditions of our production pretty much shape our artistic Products.
“My Goals Are Bigger Than Yours” is a survey of these conditions, wherein the artists approach the aforementioned issues from different media and different perspectives: humorous, ironic, serious, committed, grotesque, fragmentary and condensed. The question then is: will you hire us?
This exhibition is the result of Season #5 in Off the, Grid: My Goals Are Bigger Than Yours, organized by artists David Ghelli Santuliana, Valentino Russo, Cathleen Owens, Carmen Dusmet Carrasco & Arthur Cordier.
-
Davide Ghelli Santuliana is a multimedia artist and researcher based in Amsterdam (NL). His practice spans across different media, from moving-images, to text, to sound design. In his research he is mostly interested in analyzing the effects of semiocapitalism on the individuals, in its social, economic and political effects, but also the intersection between semiocapitalism and artistic production. For this reason, he often employs different appropriation strategies — from a direct remix of found images, to citation and re-enactement of existing motives.
Valentino Russo is a visual artist based in The Hague (NL). He is interested in the reuse and re-contextualization of images from online sources — sometimes mixed with original material. This process mirrors the endless recycle of culture that takes place in our social-media based society, a landscape characterized by the impossibility to distinguish between real and fake, true and false, right and wrong. Valentino also co-curates the artist-run space The Balcony in The Hague together with Arthur Cordier.
Cathleen Owens is a visual artist and communications consultant currently based in The Hague (NL). Cathleen works with the subjects of identity and self-representation, creating narratives centered around performative productivity and well-being. Owens also serves as co-founder and CEO of lifestyle company Your Untapped Potential.
Carmen Dusmet is a Spanish graphic designer & visual artist based in The Hague. Her work explores practices of care through design. She is interested in co-creating collaborative methodologies of making and thinking, with the subjects she works with. Beginning from personal experiences, she focuses on how socio-economic structures affect individual and collective identities. Through collaborations, video, graphic design, sound, and text, her work speaks of self-representation, identity, labour, family and intergenerational debt. She understands her work as a contemplating lens of an uncertain future; a tool to observe— and reflect on —the unpredictability of survival, growing up, ageing, change and hope. Currently, she co-runs Home Cinema, an online temporary video broadcast that responds to the question: what can we see together now that we cannot see each other?
[…]
I worked in an advertising agency,
I hate advertising.
From the experience remained a constant interest in the study of urban space and commercial trickery – better known in French as roublardise; using the language of communication against itself in a parasitic and often tautological manner.
My practice tackles the logics and aesthetic of bureaucracy, entrepreneurship and efficiency through relational, situational and contextually-specific works. I reflect on the economy of artistic practice in a production-driven society.
By revealing the economic orientation of urban spaces, and highlighting the omnipresence of commercial resources. I use the effectiveness of communication to reveal, underline and counteract its everyday functioning.
How does artistic practice engage in a world driven by productivity and the monitoring of efficiency?
