Intervention by Oliver Ressler at the main train station in Zurich, eBoard, 2006

During the exhibition at the Shedhalle a new piece made for the electronic billboard of the Zurich main train station will be shown. The piece displays the foreign debts of Africa in relation to the damages which were caused by colonialism and slavery on this continent. If it is possible to elicit the foreign debts of Africa, which were tripled between 1980 and 2000, out of the World Banks databanks (235 billion dollars for the ‘Sub-Saharan Africa’ 2004), then the calculations of the damages caused by colonialism and slavery represent a disparate and much more difficult undertaking. At the occasion of the UN World Conference against Racism in Durban in 2001 the African World Reparations and Repatriations Truth Commission brought forward a calculation based on comprehensive research and announced the sum of 777 trillion dollars. The claims of the African states were calculated using the reparation numbers of Germany for the victims of the Nazi-Regime as a point of reference. Out of fear of amend claims the Western countries deny any responsibility for colonialism and its aftermath and decline a guilt confession.

The billboard text reads:

• 235 Billion Dollars
• Africa’s External Debt
• (Debt level of sub-Saharan Africa in 2004 according to the World Bank)
• 777 Trillion Dollars
• Damages from Slavery and Colonialism
• (Source: African World Reparations and Repatriations Truth Commission)
• Cancel the Debt + Compensate for Slavery

The intervention is carried out in the framework of the exhibition “for example S, F, N, G, L, B, C – A Matter of Demarcation”, Shedhalle, Zurich, 04.11.2006 – 28.01.2007

A series of billboards, posters and banners by Oliver Ressler

The central idea behind the billboard series “Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies” is to present different suggestions, which might be of interest when considering the principles on which an alternative to the existing capitalist system could be based. Such a society should in my opinion be less hierarchical, based on ideas of direct democracy and involve as many people as possible in decision-making processes. In the field of economy this would lead towards a variety of different models of workers self-management.

The billboard series, which has been carried out in public inner-city spaces in Europe and South America so far, might provide some ideas for people who are interested in thinking about a future society. The billboards can work as food for thought, as the basis for discussions, which are so necessary today when strategies for alternatives are not clear. But it also has to be clear that a desirable society should be realized and created by the people who live in it. A model, which prescribes and determines every aspect of this future society, cannot lead towards an ideal society.

The poster and billboard texts, with their large and highly visible fonts, are in the form of appeals, questioning existing dominant power relationships and indicating alternatives that share the rejection of the capitalist system of rule. Some of the ideas presented in this project have been elaborated upon in concepts such as “Participatory Economy” by Michael Albert, “Inclusive Democracy” by Takis Fotopoulos, are suggestions for an anarchist consensual democracy by Ralf Burnicki, or are based on considerations by the theorist John Holloway, especially in his book “Change the World Without Taking Power”. This project uses the format of posters and billboards as arenas for the imagination. “Imagination is a very powerful liberating tool. If you cannot imagine something different you cannot work towards it”, explains Marge Piercy in a video interview conducted for the ongoing exhibition project “Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies” by Oliver Ressler, to which this project is related.

The first presentation of this poster series took place in the framework of the project “Quicksand in De Pijp” by SKOR and Combiwel, curated by Amiel Grumberg, which was a program of artistic interventions taking place in the De Pijp neighborhood of Amsterdam in 2004. Since then, the posters, billboards or banners have been displayed in several cities, invited and funded by art institutions, and always carried out in the local language. Sometimes the presentations in public inner-city spaces were linked with the ongoing exhibitions project “”, which was the case with the poster presentations in Rijeka, Karlsruhe and Lima. Sometimes the billboards were realized on their own (as in Bratislava and Copenhagen). While in Amsterdam around 2000 posters were placarded more or less illegal throughout several months, in Bratislava the large-scale billboards were displayed on city-owned commercial billboard sites, which were left for free to the Billboartgallery Europe, which makes them available for artists. In several of the other presentations, the house facades of art institutions, which invited me to realize works, were used for the public interventions.

• Image 1: Nikolaj Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center, 2005
• The poster texts reads: Imagine and create revolutionary processes which are not intended to take over state power but to dissolve power relations

• Image 2: Billboartgallery Europe, Bratislava, 2004
• The poster texts read: Imagine a society in which people have a say in decisions in proportion to the degree that they are affected

• Image 3: “Quicksand in De Pijp”, org. by SKOR, urban space in Amsterdam, 2004
• The poster text reads: Imagine being remunerated for effort and sacrifice, not for property or power

Banners, posters and installations by Oliver Ressler & David Thorne

“If only” is the frustrated utopian refrain of Oliver Ressler and David Thorne’s absurdly dysfunctional URL addresses collectively titled “Boom!”. Utilizing this ubiquitous textual format of the “new economy,” “Boom!” rehearses the defense mechanisms of the neoliberal imagination as it confronts its own internal crises. The acknowledged incompleteness implied by “if only” situates these texts somewhere between a guilty confession, a plea of desperation, and an ideological strategy session. The texts set for themselves the task of neutralizing the “problems” – the dislocated and potentially antagonistic groups engendered by the free market – that threaten the realization of the utopian ideal, implicitly embodied by the owners of capital. But Boom!’s utopian address deliberately fails to elicit from the viewer a positive identification with its purported message, having gone too far in specifying the contents of the universal “freedom” to which it aspires. This failure of identification thus displaces the locus of the “problem” from those constructed as the threatening “outside” of the capitalist utopia to the exclusionary, crisis-ridden grounds of that utopia itself.

Originally designed for use as banners in anticapitalist demonstrations, Ressler and Thorne’s texts reject the handmade, organic aesthetics of most conventional protest art. Instead, they share with earlier postmodern artists such as Barbara Kruger the appropriation of the graphic conventions of marketing to disrupt the smooth functioning of everyday forms of consumerist identification. But Ressler and Thorne’s texts also bear a specific historical relation to the URL format, reinvesting it with traces of social divisions linked to the digital economy, of which the dot-com address has been a key visual and textual component. In the wake of the speculation-driven Internet bubble, the phrase “dot-com” already appears as an artifact of a ruined utopia, testimony to the destructive boom-bust cycle inherent to deregulated markets. (Yates McKee, On Counterglobal Aesthetics; text from the catalogue: “Empire/State: Artists Engaging Globalization”, Whitney Museum of American Art, Independent Study Program Exhibition, New York, 2002)

”terror.gov”

The piece ”terror.gov” was realized as an issue-specific intervention for a window installation at Gallery 825 in Los Angeles within the ongoing project ”Boom!”. ”terror.gov” focuses on a present moment in the USA that could be called a ”state of exception,” a moment in which a discourse of terror seeks to foreclose – or suspend – certain kinds of political articulation, space and thought. Materially, this state of exception takes the form of directives, policies, and legislation which grant broad powers to the executive and the judiciary, and to intelligence, law enforcement, and other security apparatuses. In another sense, the state of exception has the effect of making contestatory modes of political engagement extremely difficult, since the discourse of terror relies on a rhetoric of potentiality or possibility (the potential of the unknown or the unpredictable, the possibility of future terrorist acts) in order to justify repressive measures and reciprocal acts of terror. In the name of security, ”anything goes,” and opposition to such measures is considered a kind of treachery. ”terror.gov” suggests thinking toward a space of potentiality, or possibility, that is not always only the possibility of terror, from whatever source.

The url text of the piece reads (without spaces):

www. if only people would stay locked into the threat matrix and never stop to consider the fact that the scenario in which terror is met with terror on every front is dangerously and some might say deliriously circular then they would be immediately forthcoming with every penny necessary to sustain the burn rate for ongoing military and economic operations which secure a comfortable living for a select few and condemn everyone else to oblivion while still managing to convince them of the promise that such a comfortable life could one day be theirs even though they should simply be happy that at least there is more than enough terror to go around .gov

Versions of “Boom!” have been presented in exhibitions at CCA Glasgow (GB, 2005), Ottawa Art Gallery (CAN, 2005), Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth (NZ, 2005), Kunsthalle Wien, permanent installation at Karlsplatz, Vienna (2004), Dunkers Kulturhus, Helsingborg (S, 2003), Gallery 825, Los Angeles (2003), Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program Exhibition, New York (2002), Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, LA (2002), World-Information.Org, Amsterdam (NL, 2002), Kunst Raum Goethestrasse, Linz (A, 2002), Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna (A, 2001 and 2004) and others.

“Boom!” banners were part of demonstrations against the World Economic Forum in New York, January 2002 and Salzburg, September 2002.

Inserts have been realized for the magazines Malmoe 07/2002, Afterimage 07/2002 and the “Tester” book (2004).

Oliver Ressler has developed a large-scale 16-sheet billboard project as a contribution to the “Police” exhibition (18 June to 28 August 2005) at the Landesgalerie, Linz – the state gallery for Upper Austria – that is to be put up at selected locations around the city of Linz from June 2005 on.

The following text montage is based on quotations from “Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy” (2002) by the contemporary philosopher and political theorist Jacques Rancière. It provides an indication of a theoretical framework by means of which an extended insight can be gained from this large format poster.

[In parliaments] there is a spreading climate of resignation [...] that there are scarcely any issues left to debate, that the decisions are pushing themselves forwards autonomously and that the real task of politics is none other than that of adjustment point by point to the global market and the balanced distribution of the profits and the costs involved in this adjustment process. [...] The term politics is being used generically to designate the totality of those processes by means of which the coalescence and compliance of the communities, the organisation of powers, the distribution of positions and functions, together with the system of legitimation for this distribution is implemented. I suggest that this process of distribution and the system of these legitimations should be given another name instead. My suggestion is that the process should be referred to as police. It is probable that a number of problems will result from the use of this term. The word “police” commonly conjures up an image of what we designate as the generically lower police, the truncheon-wielding force of law and order and the inquisitions conducted by the secret police. [...]

Through use of this definition the police is first and foremost an ordering of the body; determining the distribution process by the instruction of making, the instruction of being and the instruction of saying, that is responsible to ensure that these bodies are allocated their name, position and task.

Political activity is that which removes a body from a location to which it was assigned, or that changes the determination given to a location; it permits the seeing of something no location was supposed to have seen, permits speech to be listened to where formerly only noise could have been heard. [...] Or it is also the activities of demonstrators or street fighters on the barricades, who literally transform the city streets into a “public” space. [...] Politics exists when the natural suppositional logic of the ruling power [...] is thwarted. [...] The political process can be made to either happen or not to happen by one and the same thing – an election, a strike, a demonstration. A strike is not political when it demands reforms primarily in terms of improvements, nor when it denounces the authority situation instead of the inadequacy of wages. It is political instead, when it brings about a new ordering of those circumstances that have the determining influence on work in their relationship to the community.

A poster by Martin Krenn & Oliver Ressler

Martin Krenn & Oliver Ressler realized a new work on racism for “Minority Report: Challenging Intolerance in Contemporary Denmark”. One version of this work has been presented as a 4 x 4 m large banner on the facade of the The Equestrian Hall in Aarhus, Denmark, where a part of the exhibition takes place. During the night of September 24-25, 2004 – one day before the opening of Minority Report – it was taken down and stolen by an unknown person/group. This incident has already been reported to the police and an investigation started.

The second version of this work on racism by Martin Krenn & Oliver Ressler has been produced as a poster for display in 90 city light boxes in the city of Aarhus during the week of October 18-24. But the billboard company AFA JCDecaux at this point rejects to present the billboards to the public. They claim that it is not possible to present a work which uses the logo with the 12 stars of the European Union. This is of course only a very week excuse, as these stars cover only a small percentage of the billboard. It is not a copy right violation for sure, but it is a very common artistic strategy to use existing graphic material and realize something new with it. It is obvious that the company and Aarhus Municipality do not want to present the billboards in their city light boxes because of its political content. The curatorial team of Minority Report and the artists are currently negotiating with the billboard company and Aarhus Municipality to get the posters displayed and make them available to a larger audience through that.

The text on the banner and billboard posters read:

The ruling principle of capitalism legitimizes itself by means of two contrary ideologies: on the one hand the universalistic claim of the competitive society and on the other hand racism and sexism. Capitalism’s non-redeemable promise of equality is in need of ideologies of inequality like racism. Racism makes legitimate the existing relations of inequality in capitalism and thereby contributes to its reproduction. Anti-racist practice should therefore always also aim at the demontage of the capitalist system.

The artists state: “It is a shame that the city of Aarhus rejects to make our billboards available to the public in their 90 city lightboxes, although they agreed to do so at an earlier stage. The theft of our banner before the opening of Minority Report and the reaction of Aarhus Municipality to censor our anti-racist art work seem to be linked to the political situation in Denmark. The existing dominant image of the right-wing politics of exclusion in Denmark unfortunately has been confirmed through this action.” (17.10.04)

Posters against racism and EUropean politics could not be censored

Posters designed by artists Martin Krenn & Oliver Ressler for Aarhus on the topic of racism are finally installed in 90 light boxes throughout downtown Aarhus. The posters will stay up until October 24, 2004. This was possible, though the billboard company AFA JCDecaux rejected to present the billboards to the public until Friday, October 15, 2004. They claimed that it is not possible to present a work which uses the logo with the 12 stars of the European Union. It was obvious that the company and Aarhus Municipality did not want to present the billboards in their city light boxes because of its political content. After pressure by media like TV Denmark, radio stations and newspapers and an intervention by Martin Krenn & Oliver Ressler to destroy three stars of the EU Logo on the poster Aarhus Municipality had to give in. The very weak excuse to censor the work because of a “copy right violation” was undermined by the intervention from the artists.

A project by Martin Krenn & Oliver Ressler – Container-installation in Graz, Wels and Munich

For more infos about this project visit the project website http://www.eu-c-c.com

A City-Light series by Oliver Ressler in the urban space of Munich, within the framework of the Kunstverein München’s exhibition “Exchange & Transform”

At busy sites in Munich’s inner city, 175 x 119 cm posters will be presented as City Lights from 14 May to 10 June 2002. The repressive actions of both politics and police against the demonstration on the occasion of the 38th NATO security conference which took place from 1 – 3 February 2002 in Munich provides a starting point for the poster series. Munich’s chief mayor, Christian Ude (SPD), took an unverified claim from the German constitutional protection agency, that 3,000 “violence-prone demonstrators” were planning excessive acts of violence and a “de-glassing” of Munich’s inner city as cause to impose a three-day demonstration ban. The lifting of the Schengen agreement and the prohibition for demonstration participants to cross the border from neighboring countries accompanied this measure in order to avoid, according to Bavaria’s Minister of the Interior Günther Beckstein (CSU), “leftist, cross-border violence tourism.”

More than 3,500 police officers, special vehicles, and barricades were called in to execute the officially prescribed infringement of the constitutional right to free demonstration during the NATO security conference.

7,000 anti-war activists and opponents of economic globalization attempted – despite prohibitions, barriers, and police encirclements – to practice their right to demonstrate in Munich’s inner city. Of these, 792 were arrested although participation in a prohibited demonstration is actually tantamount to a disruption of public order (comparable to a traffic violation).

Through the construction of fictive threatening scenarios, people were hindered from practicing their democratic rights and the proudly claimed “Liberalitas Bavariae” (the Bavarian liberalness) of politics, police, secret service and media were trampled on.

The three poster subjects of the City-Light series bring together the available knowledge on location at the events around the NATO security conference with the fact that a month after the total demonstration ban by the SPD head mayor, his politics – and thereby also the restriction of democratic rights – was confirmed by a brilliant election victory. Therefore, in the work “This is what democracy looks like (Liberalitas Bavariae)” in the City-Light posters, the Social Democratic Party’s (SPD’s) election slogans, “Munich needs more red!” and “It is about Munich” are combined with events surrounding the demonstration ban. The poster subjects, presented at various sites throughout the inner city, create an open structure and do not allow for a clear designation of who is behind the posters. With two of the posters it is even possible that passers-by could believe Munich’s SPD to be the initiator, proud of suspending democratic rights. In this case this intervention into the “order of discourse,” as Foucault described that essential element of the exercise of power, would amount to a weakening of the position of the supposed authors, the SPD, at the level of symbol-politics. The third poster makes a clear statement: “The restriction of democratic rights has many abbreviations” is written next to the abbreviations: CSU, SPD, KVR, VGH and UDE.

This intervention to the urban space is connected in terms of content with the video “This is what democracy looks like!” (38 min, 2002) about a police encirclement on the occasion of the first anti-globalization demonstration in Austria. The video could likewise be seen in the framework of the exhibition project “Exchange & Transform” in the Kunstverein München from 26 April to 1 September 2002.

Poster texts:

• “It is about Munich”The constitutional right to free demonstration successfully suspended!
• Once again next year
• Bans on demonstrations – Bans on events – Police encirclements – Mass arrests – Restriction of democratic rights“Munich has more red!”
• Cordial thanks for your vote
• The restriction of democratic rights has many abbreviationsCSU, SPD, KVR, VGH, UDE

An exhibition by Oliver Ressler in the Forum Stadtpark, bill poster series in Graz (A)

warning signs: Galerie Artelier (Graz), Galerie Fotohof (Salzburg), Galerie Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert (Cologne), Generali Foundation (Vienna), Kunstraum Lueneburg, Kunstraum Muenchen (Munich), MAK (Vienna), NGBK (Berlin), Neuer Kunstverein Aachen, Raum aktueller Kunst (Vienna), Shedhalle (Zurich)

Oliver Ressler has compiled a critical inventory of the public treatment of discussions surrounding gene technology. The artist’s project is conceived as a counterbalance to five “Gen-Welten” (Gene-Worlds) exhibitions taking place at present (Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in Bonn, Deutsches Hygiene-Museum in Dresden etc.).

Ressler’s exhibition project “geGen-Welten: Widerstände gegen Gentechnologien” (opposing Gene-Worlds: Oppositions to Genetic Engineering) comprises of three integral parts. A poster series with warning references in Graz, warning signs put up in various art institutions in Germany, Switzerland and Austria (in the Galerie und Edition Artelier in Graz, the Generali Foundation in Vienna, the NGBK in Berlin, the Shedhalle in Zurich etc.) and the exhibition in the Forum Stadtpark.

The exhibition presents information material such as pamphlets, manifestos and information brochures of organisations critical of genetic engineering. The show is arranged in single thematic areas, such as genetic engineering in agriculture, genetic engineering and feminism or biological warfare, which are represented comprehensively.

An assault on a genetic engineering laboratory by the militant women’s group “” lead to the crimination of almost all opponents of genetic engineering at the end of the eighties by the economy, political world and media working hand in hand. “This crimination attaches itself to women who champion radical attitudes towards genetic engineering, who do not even let themselves become integrated in predetermined discussions on the level ‘chances and risks’. Genetic engineering is altogether an instrument of domination and control”, as one pamphlet puts it.

As the subject is very complicated as a hole, Ressler has included contact addresses of the individual organisations so that interested exhibition visitors can approach them.

(This text by Franz Niegelhell was published in the German version in the daily newspaper “Neue Zeit” on March 22, 1998)

For more infos about this project by Martin Krenn & Oliver Ressler visit the project website http://www.ressler.at/institutional_racism

A project by Martin Krenn & Oliver Ressler for Neue Galerie, Graz

In Austria, the concept of homeland is implemented not only regionally but also on a supra-regional and state level. This is meant to facilitate and force the citizens’ emotional attachment to the state. This type of manipulation already takes place in the school institution “Learned Homeland”/”Gelernte Heimat” attempts to illustrate these “nativizing strategies” with Austrian school books. The construction of “homeland” is particularly vivid in school books.

In creating collective identities through the concept of homeland, the “own” is always valued against the “other” and in this way demarcated from it. The “own” history is glorified, or even falsified. “Natural beauty” is pulled in for symbolization and concretization of the “Austria homeland” and used to produce a sense of the citizens’ ties to the “homeland.”

Through the early influence of the state school institution on the pupils, equating Austria with homeland is deemed natural. This leads to a situation in which an obviously constructed sense of homeland is seen as a natural fundamental human necessity and is hardly ever questioned.

Poster object at the main square:

Two school book pages expanded with blocks of text and an announcement of the exhibition in the Neue Galerie animated observers to confront the construction of a homeland-concept using their own school experiences. Interviews with passers-by reading the texts on the posters were carried out and recorded on video.

Exhibition in the Neue Galerie:

In the first room of the exhibition, the video documentation of the reactions of those passing by and reading the posters was shown. On display in the next two rooms were twelve Bubblejet prints, which thematized further examples of homeland constitution found in the school textbooks.

Presented in the fourth room was the video “Learned Homeland – Working Talks”/”Gelernte Heimat – Arbeitsgespräche”. This video includes theorists from Austria and Germany who have published texts on racism and homeland.

Interviews were carried out with: Jost Müller, Nora Räthzel, Juliane Rebentisch, Mark Terkessidis, Vera Kockot, Herbert Nikitsch/Bernhard Tschofen and Walter Manoschek.

The conversations expand the content of the theme by pointing out the relationship between homeland and racism in Austria and Germany.