Description
When Jimi Hendrix released Purple Haze in 1967, he did not intend to issue a pop-environmentalist manifesto – yet this was precisely how the song was read by the Hungarian-American artist György Kepes. In the 1969 essay 'Art and Ecological Consciousness', the director of MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies interpreted the refrain of Hendrix’s hit record – “Excuse me while I kiss the sky” – as an expression of “hopes of the richer, expanded world” and anger at humankind’s “short-sighted selfishness”. Testifying to the first cosmic journeys, advance of first network media and birth of planetary capitalism, Kepes insisted that the closed circuits of information flows and economic exchange on the Earth must be re-imagined as if experienced from the outside. It was artists like Jimi Hendrix that Kepes saw fit for the task of dissociating the modern human’s self-centered perception of the world – trying to see it from within and beyond at once; staying engaged in the human affairs while acknowledging the existence of the temporalities, spaces and agencies that surpass the “here and now” of modernity. In works of many contemporary artists, the impending ecological catastrophe and globally relevant social issues are framed within a posthuman, planetary perspective. The exhibition 'While I Kiss the Sky' traces the dissociative aesthetics’ development throughout the last century. With work by Nikolaus Gansterer, Alicja Kwade, Natalia LL, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Katja Novitskova, Otto Piene, Sung Tieu & Debora Delmar, Guan Xiao. On the 12th of September 2019, at 6 pm festive opening of the group exhibition at Galerie Gabriele Senn in Vienna, Austria in the framework of "curated by festival". Curated by Goschka Gawlik & Arkadiusz Półtorak.