DaDaDa: Strategies Against Marketecture
Curated by Pil and Galia Kollectiv (http://www.kollectiv.co.uk)

22 October - 21 November, 2004
Fri- Sun 12-6pm

Private View: Thursday 21st October 18.30-22.00

The exhibition is a unique opportunity to explore the visual aesthetics of resistance. Taking in work that mixes up art, music and design, artists from the US, Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Japan, Finland and the UK, provide a critical and often playful opposition to contemporary hyper-structured consumer culture. 'DaDaDa: Strategies against Marketecture’ deals in appropriation & DIY revolution, craft & hi-tech collage through 2D, video, music and installation pieces that examine the relationship between present technologies and the more traditional cut and paste methods employed by ideologically motivated artists in the twentieth century, a movement from Mertz assemblages to current computer screen manipulations.

As well as live performances from Anat Ben-David and Patrick Wolf on the opening night, the exhibition will be accompanied by a fanzine format catalogue and a limited edition compilation CD of some of the most exciting bands emerging today alongside artists featured in the show.

supported by

Artists: Anat Ben-David, Jessica Broas, Chicks on Speed, DAT Politics, Christopher Dobrowolski, Pil and Galia Kollectiv, Mister Ministeck, Noriko Okaku, Erkki Rautio, ROR (Revolutions on Request), Hiraki Sawa, Hideyuki Sawayanagi, Dallas Seitz

Strategien gegen Architekturen (vols. I-III), is a series of three compilations documenting the music of German industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten, famed for their attempts to conquer the repressed rebuilt surfaces of postwar Berlin by beating on the physical structures of the city and using them as instruments. "Far from suggesting that the buildings should be destroyed, they attempted to release the cacophony they perceived to be trapped within the static forms, motivating the energy potential in solid objects". As for marketecture, nobody’s quite sure what that is. The Internet’s Word Spy dictionary has it that it is:

marketecture (mar.kuh.TEK.chur) n. 1. A new computer architecture that is being marketed aggressively despite the fact that it doesn't yet exist as a finished product. 2. The design and structure of a market or a marketing campaign. Also: marchitecture.

Elsewhere it is referred to as the business perspective of the system's architecture.

To us, however, it is like Einstürzende Neubauten’s city, a repressed, hyperdefined space that needs to be conquered. We are surrounded by the collapsing new buildings of mass mediated consumer culture, which we seek not to destroy but to make our own, to release their buried meanings. These are the raw materials on which we impose our strategies.

The exhibition features artists, writers and musicians, who each strategically position themselves in relation to this great living/dead cityscape. Some find ready made objects, sounds, ideas in the debris, using them against the grain to reveal a truer nature. Others add pixel to pixel or frame to frame to explore the beauty seen only through the eye of the machine. Some see spaceships in tea cups, insects in shopping carts, pagans in Tesco, erotic eruptions in videogame consoles and wonderful weird druid songs in polyphonic ring tones. Others dance to a different tune, recorded on makeshift instruments in a bedroom all their own. This is democracy with a ‘d’ for d.i.y., and you’re welcome to make your own.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fanzine format catalogue with texts by Amanda Beech and
Avi Pitchon and a limited edition compilation CD featuring: 3puen, Anat Ben-David, Charlie Megira,
Chicks on Speed, DAT Politics, Gelbart, Frederik Schikowski, Simon Bookish and Patrick Wolf.

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