New Graffiti, Old Revolutions is an exhibition that imagines readings of contemporary culture as seen through the prisms of the ‘hauntological’ and the ‘spectral.’ These ideas are understood as ways of inscribing the past within the present, not as a way to order knowledge, but as a means of encountering the strange, the unheard of, the obscure and the other.  The term Hauntology was first used by Jacques Derrida in Spectres of Marx and more recently it has become shorthand in music criticism as a way of reading (analysing) music that is sample based and/or reliant on obsolete technologies. However it’s origins can be speculated back to Marcel Proust’s À La Recherche du Temps Perdu  (In Search of Lost Time), where he puts forward  the notion of ‘involuntary memory;’ the unexpected and sudden recurrence of the forgotten. The exhibition is a place to test our relation to the obsolete by examining the elusive identities of the living, and exploring the boundaries between the thought and un-thought. The idea is to create a ‘spectral’ debate to understand what ‘hauntology’ could mean in terms of artistic methodologies and productions.

Jason Coburn (UK)
The work of Jason Coburn suggests intermediate values between ideas, objects and histories, and considers art as both the origin and the product of other discourses and practices. His current work is constructed around the idea of the 'conceptual work of production' and puts forward understandings of representation and ‘recording technologies’ by drawing from and mixing their visual and material traditions. In doing so, he suggests a ‘signature’ filled with echoes of other ‘signatures’ and alludes to disconcerting utopias of idealised forms.
www.jasoncoburn.tumblr.com

Karin Hueber (CH)
The installations and sculptures of Karin Hueber deal with spatial phenomena and the parameters of architecture. She translates and reclaims space through installations of deconstructive spatial models that appropriate the ground plan of their surroundings. As such, the psychological and physical impacts of the built environment on the existence of the people inhabiting it are central to Hueber's work. For this exhibition she presents the drawing Zustand 2, originally a component part of a 2007 installation at the Kuttner Siebert Gallery in Berlin. The composition suggests collapse in suspended animation and the use of pigment captures an unlikely blend of austere minimalism and spinning change. In its original context, its presence gave a formal logic to the viewer’s movement within a configuration of objects that disrupted the clean lines of the gallery. Here, it’s condition is as a re-inscription of a trace, opening up the possibility for mis-reading and imagined space.
www.karinhueber.com

Kevin Logan (UK)
The particular field of interest that media artist Kevin Logan researches is the archaeology of media; an examination of collective memory through the editing and repurposing recorded material. This process often entails the use of old recordings as analytical tools to explore “dilapidated versions of bygone forms in which the past is simultaneously absent and present.” The use of acquired reel-to-reel recordings explores the decay inherent within them due to the use of magnetic iron oxides used to fix the recordings. For this exhibition he presents a new work “The End Of Something, The Sound Of Something Ending (Production Stills And Sound Rushes)” – ­a document of secondary fiction, unreliable provenance and a false stereo-field.


Eric von Robertson (US)
Eric von Robertson works under the conceptual framework of C.A.R.L. – The Center for the Advancement of Recreation and Leisure. As Robertson says, “C.A.R.L. is a destination, a way of locating and rerouting the world around us, through a process of excursions and sculptural prototypes.” These prototypes are tossed into a series of field studies that travel between remote and urban landscapes – places where a large inflatable cushion of air is uncontrollably swept through the streets, to a pack of stray dogs sporting custom designed textiles that offer new routes and intersections for ‘City Guides’.  The mis-adventures he enacts and the souvenirs they produce become absurd models in tourism – an industry that continually mines the past to re-write a present that is apparently trapped in the 'end of history.'
vonrobertson.wordpress.com


Edward Clydesdale Thomson (UK)
Since 2008 Edward Clydesdale Thomson has been traveling to Tromsø in order to realize a photographic project which uses official and unofficial archives to uncover the relation between landscape, politics and local identity. Sidestepping the conventions of research he re-imagines the archive as a source of evocative imagery and multiple narratives - a place for speculation beyond the confines of sanctioned histories. “My most recent work stems from a fixation with landscape and cultural formation. A resurgence in the appreciation of local identity has emerged in Tromsø over the last two years and I’ve repeatedly spent periods there fascinated and bewildered by this. The Borderline Picturesque & The Recounting Prospect works stems from this period. I collected as many postcards as I could, dividing and categorizing them in the studio. I made two still life images depicting the postcards. One is of ethnographical portraits, the other, a house of cards made from generic landscape postcards of the area. Together the images address two competing sides in the resurgence of local identity in Tromsø; one being the Samisk culture, the other, Northern Norwegian culture.”
www.edwardthomson.net

Ari Versluis & Ellie Uyttenbroek (NL)
Rotterdam-based photographer Ari Versluis and profiler Ellie Uyttenbroek have worked together since 1994. Inspired by a shared interest in the striking dress codes of various social groups, they have been systematically constraining the permutations of received identity on an international scale for over 15 years. They call their series Exactitudes: a contraction of exact and attitude. By registering their subjects in an identical framework, with similar poses and a strictly observed dress code, Versluis and Uyttenbroek provide an almost scientific record of people’s attempts to distinguish themselves from others by assuming a group identity. The apparent contradiction between individuality and uniformity is, however, taken to such extremes in their arresting objective-looking photographic viewpoint and stylistic analysis that the artistic aspect clearly dominates the purely documentary element. Placing their subjects in a formal limbo, their vague individuality begins to operate outside of the deadlines and sell-by-dates of fashion.
www.exactitudes.com


Esmé Valk (NL)
Esmé Valk uses a variety of media to study the social relationship between bodies who are in constant movement in response to each other. Within everyday movement she investigates the interactions between the individual and the group. She questions the influence of biological factors, other bodies and the environment on individual decision making. In the video work Sundays a group, dressed in costumes made of used mattress fabric, perform a dance ritual called the ‘polonaise,’ traditionally practiced at carnival time. The group moves in a circle through an empty, white space. Each costume is unique, and their design derives from the same visual language. The actors dance in their own way to the same rhythm. There is a tension between the actors’ status as independent individuals and as constituent parts of one ‘body’. The work talks about the nature of conformity and membership. The figures, half-blind stumbling in never-ending circles, covered from head to toe, disintegrating, mummy-like, are quintessentially Other
www.esmevalk.com

New Graffiti, Old Revolutionsis curated by Jason Coburn
Supported by the Centrum voor Beeldende Kunst, Rotterdam