Latvia 2017

Miķelis Fišers presents “What Can Go Wrong” at the 57th Venice Art Biennale.

“What Can Go Wrong”, and can be interpreted in various ways –as surprise, question, or as history. This ambiguity highlights an issue that concerns practically all contemporary projects: How do we talk about “our time”? And in what language? Miķelis Fišers chooses the language of the renegade, a marginal discourse full of unscientific bodies and substances – Grays, Egregores, Secret Governments and other esoteric master signifiers. Out of all the bodies of knowledge, he chooses knowledge without status. A romantic propensity towards the author’s hand, beautiful compositions, lines and colors, references carefully selected with subjective pleasure, ignoring everything objectively progressive – with this concept, Fišer’s art is quite the ideal opposite to the status quo of contemporary art, as defined with criticality by the artist Paul Chan: “Objective forces manifest in art today as subjective acts without an actual subjectivity, to express the power of inhumanity to define what is most human.” In disagreement with legitimate violence, in “What Can Go Wrong”, Miķelis Fišers demonstrates how life on earth is squandered, reminding us of the “banality of evil” (Arendt).

Text author: Inga Šteimane (curator of the Latvian pavilion)