It’s the Political Economy, Stupid

The Pori Art Museum, one of the most experimental art institution in Finland, presents It’s the Political Economy, Stupid, a group exhibition that discusses the current crisis in a sustained and critical manner. The show has been touring in the last three years and after the editions at the Open Space in Vienna, the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York and the Centre of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki will be on display in Finland until May 26.

The show brings together a selection of international artists – Filippo Berta, Julia Christensen, Field Work, Yevgeniy Fiks, Olga Kopenkina & Alexandra Lerman, flo6x8, Melanie Gilligan, Jan Peter Hammer, Alicia Herrero, Institute for Wishful Thinking, Sherry Millner & Ernie Larsen, Olafur Olafsson & Libia Castro, Isa Rosenberger, Dread Scott, Superflex, Zanny Begg & Oliver Ressler – who use different media to address questions like globalization, privativazion, market deregulation, public debt and austerity.

As the philosopher and theorist Slavoj Žižek states: “the central task of the ruling ideology in the present crises is to impose a narrative which will place the blame for the meltdown not on the global capitalist system as such, but on secondary and contingent deviations (overly lax legal regulations, the corruption of big financial institutions, and so on).” The works on display, from this point of view, seem to react to this economical and political juncture by pushing back the disciplary dictates of the capitalistic logic and, at the same time, by revaluating the very notion of the social itself.