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KCC Call for Artists: Nothing is – everything just has been or will be

In the past, the KCC has held an open call for UK-based artists to submit proposals which have been subject to a judging process: successful artists got to participate in a group show at the KCCUK. This year, the KCCUK is collaborating with their colleagues in Germany. Six artists will be selected, for a group show that will take place this summer in Germany and at the end of the year in London.

The exhibition theme is entitled Nothing is – everything just has been or will be. Note that you do not have to be Korean to participate: “proposals should incorporate elements of Korean culture, history etc. OR the proposed artist(s) be of Korean heritage.”

Application deadline is tight: submit your proposals by 1 February. Full details on the KCC website here, and the enigmatic brief is reproduced below:

Nothing is – everything just has been or will be

KCC 2021 Open Call for Artists

Nothing like a blue bird
from New York
fall from the sky
into the ocean
there will be light
in a moment
shine from the sky

a big blue whale
scream in the ocean
the wave
the light shine again
just like the bird

free

time

become

a moment to come
a moment to go

By Zhenhua Li

In the mid 1980s, the author and director Alexander Kluge lamented the bitter loss of historical consciousness. His film Der Angriff der Gegenwart auf die übrige Zeit [The Blind Director, 1985] criticises the languishing of the present as an effect of time conceived in ever-faster and ever-smaller intervals. In light of two potentially paradoxical but potently interacting processes, society increasingly faces a shortage of time: with digitalisation, time becomes more abstract and its value more difficult to grasp. Further, in an increasingly global service economy, time mutates not only into a commodity but also into a general equipollent in the form of bits and bytes. Time started to tend away from being an experiential quality to be reckoned with. Today the spread of a flat awareness of time again provokes complaint but with new areas of concern. With regard to the past, criticism focuses on the phenomenon of oblivion which accompanies the development of fast telematic technologies. The act of forgetting is systematically promoted through digital machines and their deification of the present. In fact, one can speak of sophisticated culture technologies of EnBnnern, a combination of the German terms entrinnen, meaning to escape from something, and erinnern, to remember something. But between paranoia and melancholy there is a third mode of time consciousness, which is worth to re:activate – to enjoy the auspicious moment.

By Prof. Dr. Siegfried Zielinski

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