DESTE’s Anti-Structure
| What: ANTI-STRUCTURE, Curated by Andreas Melas Anti-Structure explores the far-fetched realm of fine lines between order and chaos, stasis and flux, structure and fragility. Taking an immersive installation by Urs Fischer as a starting point, and placing it in dialogue with the works of twenty-one Greek and Cypriot, the exhibition explores the delicate dance between structure and insubordination.Coined in 1969 by cultural anthropologist Victor Turner (1920–1983), “anti-structure” is a study of the state of mental and spiritual limbo that is characteristic of the second stage—the liminal stage—of any rite of passage, when the novitiate is neither here nor there but, betwixt and between, remains enveloped in abiding upheaval and disarray and a preternatural void. “Anti-structure” thus describes a stage of perpetual transformation characterized by moments of dissolution where “structural hierarchies are flattened or inverted.” Whereas the dominant ideology du jour was that any such breakdown would result in anomie and angst, Turner recognized that in times of great happenstance, culture in fact reboots itself and new symbols, models, and paradigms arise. It is not unusual to find such pockets of clandestine novelty simmering deep in the underground, the pregnant margins of normative order. It is in these lands of strangers and exiles, that one finds fertile ground for radical thought and very strange ideas. It is these ideas cultivated in the fringes of institutionalized etiquette that bring forth novel ways of dress, posture, and expression, attitudes that when fully formed feed back into the system to either break or make the mainstream. Anti-Structure features artworks by: When: June 2–October 27, 2021 Where: DESTE Foundation, Athens |
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