SMALL REALITIES
Private Narrations – Private Realities

Concept: Mirjana Peitler Selakov / Walter Kratner

„The modern project is not finished yet", said Jean-François Lyotard, but however, it must reflects their unnoticed narratives, like that of the progress and/or the fulfilable sense of history as fiction, as a kind of „meta narrative".

1.
From the side of clarification and modernism, once announced as a „Great Narration" of human progress and human rationality and about classless society, it came out as a deceit picture of an welfare-historical promise.

As a kind of opposite to that „Great Narration", the exhibition "Small Realities" should give a chance to the „small" narrations, and this exactly at Bucharest, where one-fifth of the city was demolished only for constructing the third largest building in the world: The Palace of the Parliament.

The overall plan of the project "Small Realities" is that each artistic proposal is presented, contextualised in the exhibition space of Bucharest in which it gains a new significance and efficacy that can guarantee its social, political and media impact. ("Art itself possesses no type of social impact. It is its contextualisation which gives it its power"). Much of the exhibition consists of working out some of the details of how social reality today is constructed. The show also offers a critical examination of the reality of daily life, illuminating largely neglected aspects of social realities by Austrian Artists.

In this context the exhibition relates to "small" realities, which are not part of the „Great History". It should tell some stories without big attitudes and without great gestures. It is about life and circum stances after the death of the „Great Idea", after the end of large narrations.

Into certain mass, a decrease to the "Small Realities" has to be produced, without any monumentality. Spectacular moments and narrations like "speculative narrative" (Lyotard) or world explanations should not be involved here.

2.
The exhibition "Small Realities" focuses on such artistic practices, which are developed throw the processes of sensualisation, beginning from the spontaneously idea, fragments filled with the lyric modesty, which merge themselves by personal stories into the reality. It concerns the smallest details, which will be never generalized, which will be never part of the "Great History". It concerns to produce the situations or to show, how to make these small narrations possible.

One intention of the Project is to show artistic strategies and approaches, which are creating small realities. It is about most intimate, most fragile, most personal things…

3.
The topic "Small Realities" develops also from the question: What means to be an artist today?

In the modernism, the artists were a kind of pioneers and as a part of the historical avant-garde the artists decorated themselves with a kind of rebellious attitudes. The „Great Narration" was written by them.

But today, when we live in social realities which make us possible to have several identities for several "Small Realities" at the same time, what happened with the particular one? When multiple identities are required is there one identity, several or none? And what happened with the artist in this context?

The exhibition project will be a form of reading the daily life and will present to the public the archaeology of "Small Realities".