FAIR PLAY
Barbara Seiler, Zürich
28 January – 27 February 2016
“What we are concerned with now are the implications – in particular, the complex of ideas and events represented by World War III. Not the political and military possibility, but the inner identity of such a notion. For us, perhaps, World War III is now little more than a sinister pop art display, but for your husband it has become an expression of the failure of his psyche to accept the fact of its own consciousness, and of his revolt against the present continuum of time and space. Dr Austin may disagree, but it seems to me that his intention is to start World War III, though not, of course, in the usual sense of the term. The blitzkriegs will be fought out on the spinal battlefields, in terms of the postures we assume, of our traumas mimetized in the angle of a wall or balcony.”
– J. G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, 1990.
The objects that surround us in our everyday life rarely attract our attention. They usually disappear behind their function, and even those that require our interaction on daily basis, exist only remotely. What lies behind the lack of focus is our impressive network of ideological, conceptual and technological developments. In a constant process of optimising our life, we have, often violently and at the cost of our natural environment, fueled a general process of consolidation. If we look at the objects which define our personal environment, we identify a set of technological objects, a subservience of the real to the comforts of pure function and industrial production.
What is evoked by Safavi is joy. It unfolds around a historical and personal context, which imposes upon us in full existential and ontological commotion.
