M HKA Ensembles

MuHKA, Antwerpen

15 December 2006 - 25 February 2007

THE PROJECTION PROJECT investigates how art offers alternatives to projections we are faced with every day: a dominance of phantasmagorical creation of images that permeate daily reality by politics, commerce and the entertainment industry through the medium of technology. 

Projection often occurs in all kinds of formats in the practice of art and in thinking about visual culture. The many meanings of projection are the result of a development in which very different fields of knowledge sometimes interact: physics, geometry, cartography, optics, psychology, the fine arts and show business.
However, the concept of projection has not been used as a topic very often, perhaps because of its complexity; it unites mathematical and cultural visualisation, and actions of the unconscious and active consciousness. At the same time, projection is omnipresent, in both the literal and figurative sense. We are living in an escapist culture of fantasies and wishful visions right through to often downright delusions. 
Projection is a very old process, but it is also continually being transformed. Fascination with the projected image and with the context in which that image is experienced connects the artist of the 21st century with the artist/'artisan' of the 19th century. In times of plenty and image availability, there is an increased interest in art that still conjured up a model of visual culture with the emphasis on uniqueness and economy of the image. 

Present-day projection art also comprises an interest in technology as a hallucinogen. There is a relationship with psychedelic projection from the second half of the 1960s: it is only now people are dealing with the legacy of that visually excessive art form. However, there is one difference from the 1960s, viz. the insight that reality as such is often a hallucination. That insight is expressed in contemporary art, and thus opens up a new chapter of projection art. 

Recent projection art is further distinguished from dominant projections in our visual culture because it re-evaluates the implicit ambition of the term: projection as a project, a visionary image, a reflection on the future. Historical awareness is restored, for projection as pure utopia is a reaction to the present, a product of its time and therefore rooted in a past. 
THE PROJECTION PROJECT takes place in a media landscape in which another paradigm is manifest. Today we witness the definitive departure of various analogue image technologies. As a result of the digital revolution various techniques hallowed by modern art tradition, such as slide and film projection, fall into irreversible disuse. The world of art responds with a mixture of lucid nostalgia and militant identification; slide and film projection will remain important media in contemporary art, but they can hardly be considered separately from the impact of a melancholic looking back on an era and a technology that once were.

The historical bankruptcy of projection as a technology means that we have come to a point at which projection should no longer be thought of in strictly technological terms. Precisely in the broad sense we can reconsider the concept of projection. In that context, the socio-political undertone of projection as a collective event or project of a future collectiveness is a subject for debate. In this period when projection is losing its technological usefulness and corresponding disciplinary status, the term can regain its allegorical expressiveness. Therefore it is our hypothesis that articulation artists today are again addressing the artistic application of the concept of 'projection'. In this context, the 'live' event becomes a major element: projection as a momentary living fact. The presentation and publication project THE PROJECTION PROJECT aims to visualise this rethinking process (in the double meaning of memory and reconsideration) by means of a multitude of works, and to validate projection as not just an exhibition format – which happens often enough in contemporary art – but also to articulate it as a project, as a promising technique. 

"History of art is a history of prophecies. It can only be written down from the point of view of the direct actual present; for every period has its own new and non-heritable possibility of interpreting the prophecies that art of earlier times contains precisely in this respect." {Walter Benjamin}
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Curators:
Edwin Carels, Mark Kremer and Dieter Roelstraete
Participating artists:
Marie José Burki, Marc De Blieck, Thierry De Cordier, Rodney Graham, Pierre Huyghe, Kristina Ianatchkova & Vitto Valentinov, Timothée Ingen-Housz, Yeondoo Jung, André Kruysen,Bertrand Lavier, Bruce Nauman, Stephen & Timothy Quay, Joost Rekveld, Matthew Stokes, Fiona Tan, Krassimir Terziev, Ana Torfs, Paul Van Hoeydonck, Benjamin Verdonck, Cerith Wyn Evans and Thomas Zummer

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