UBERMORGEN.COM
Superenhanced
OPENING & PERFORMANCE: Saturday, January 17, 2009 at 6.00 PM
From January 17 to March 7, 2009
3.00 – 7.00 PM, closed on Sunday
Fabio Paris Art Gallery is proud to announce the second solo exhibition by
the Austrian artist duo UBERMORGEN.COM, presenting the world preview of the
project “Superenhanced”, which is dedicated to the pressing issue of
torture. Though torture is banned almost everywhere, it has re-emerged
under a new set of names with the neutral, tidy, functional language of
marketing and branding. http://ipnic.org/superenhanced
Kidnapping is now called “extraordinary rendition”, and torture is
“enhanced interrogation”: “an efficient way to extract valuable
information from unwilling detainees” that uses so-called “soft”
techniques such as the Attention Grab (the interrogator forcefully grabs
the prisoner’s shirt front and shakes them) and the Attention Slap (an
open-handed slap to the face); the Belly Slap (a hard open-handed slap to
the abdomen, able to cause pain, but not internal injury); this then
continues into “harsh techniques” like then Long Time Standing, with
prisoners forced to stand, handcuffed, for more than 40 hours; the Cold
Cell, where the prisoner is left to stand naked in a cell kept near 10
degrees Celsius; Waterboarding, a controlled form of drowning, and Sleep
Deprivation, where they are not allowed to sleep for several days. These
are mostly psychological techniques, which do not leave marks on the
detainee’s body, and have been used for years (since the Reagan
administration) in America’s Supermax prisons (but also in places like
Kandahar, Bagram Airbase and Guantanamo Bay) to prepare ‘unlawful enemy
combatants’ (including numerous children) for interrogation. The final
set of methods used by authorities are the classic extremely brutal ones:
Hanging prisoners by their wrists for days, beating prisoners, breaking
bones, amputation of limbs, starving prisoners and killing prisoners.
UBERMORGEN.COM gets to grips with this sinister subject matter, but rather
than condemning a human rights outrage that is there for all to see,
appears to be more interested, on one hand, in exploring the hypocrisies of
the language that renders it acceptable, and on the other the moral
position of the spectator when exposed to ambiguous questions and
disturbing images. The point of departure is the Superenhanced Generator, a
web project (displayed in installation form) that contains a smart
interrogation engine, basically capable of comprehending the spectator’s
responses, and that generates a fake legal document (a foriginal), modelled
on rendition orders and interrogation protocols.
The installation is accompanied by a series of photographic prints (
http://ipnic.org/superenhanced/photos.html ) and a video which adopt the
ascetic aesthetic of maximum security prisons representing child prisoners
undergoing intimidation and torture: the photos are staged poses of a
reality that no-one wants to believe in – a reality that is conveyed to
the public eye as a form “collateral damage” in a “necessary” fight
against terror. The images are nicely lit and professionally produced, but
they are profoundly unsettling due to the truths that lie beneath their
patina of glamour.
On the evening of the opening, the installation will be accompanied by a
performance.
UBERMORGEN.COM (lizvlx & Hans Bernhard, www.ubermorgen.com) is an artist
duo based in Vienna, Austria. Behind UBERMORGEN.COM we can find one of the
most unmatchable identities – controversial and iconoclast – of the
contemporary European techno-fine-art avant-garde. Their open circuit of
conceptual art, drawing, software art, pixelpainting, computer
installations, net.art, sculpture and digital activism (media hacking)
transforms their brand into a hybrid Gesamtkunstwerk.
In February/March 2009, Christoph Merian Verlag (Publisher) will release:
HANS BERNHARD, LIZVLX – UBERMORGEN.COM, MEDIA HACKING VS. CONCEPTUAL ART,
ALESSANDRO LUDOVICO (ED.) with contributions by Olia Lialina, Dragan
Espenschied, Florian Cramer, Yukiko Shikata, Cornelia Sollfrank, Inke Arns,
Peter Weibel, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Marina Grzinic, Grischinka Teufl, Stefan
Nussbaumer, Jacob Lillemose, Nebojsa Milikic, Raffael Doerig, Domenico
Quaranta and 2 Interviews (WMMNA & Neural.it). And in February 2009,
FPEditions (www.fpeditions.com) will publish the monograph UBERMORGEN.COM
(edited by Domenico Quaranta, with contributions by Inke Arns and
Jodi.org).
fabioparisartgallery
via Alessandro Monti 13 – 25121 Brescia – tel. 030 3756139 – Skype:
fabioparisbs
www.fabioparisartgallery.com
Superenhanced is supported by MIGROS kulturprozent
