CAFÉ TROJAN HORSE

CAFÉ TROJAN HORSE
10 - 20 November 2009
a r a r, Patrick Coyle, Lawrence Leaman, Ania Micinska Joe Watling and Sayshun Jay
Curated by Shama Khanna

The works in Café Trojan Horse make use of readymade visual, textual and coded formats normally employed in business and media communications. Here, their function might be described as counter-information, proliferating according to our subjective responses and the spaces in between these and other visitors' encounters with the work.

The artists involved were invited to think the exhibition in relation to the act(s) of waiting, anticipating, treading water, ruminating or limbo-ing. There are perhaps two common types of anticipation inherent in attending an art exhibition or event: expecting something to be communicated, and expecting something unforeseen to happen. Ultimately, if something is communicated or something happens, it is between the visitor and the exhibit or it is created collectively, between the different responses of audience members to the works on display.

The exhibition’s signifiers and ephemera – those things that often act to fill in the gaps of a multivalent and volatile exchange – will be tested. Who or what might prolong the denial of communication? Whose interests does it serve to perpetuate a sense of absence or non-communication?

Café Trojan Horse seeks to foreground the role of the unforeseen, the accidental marks, that inform the exhibition before it opens and, in doing so, suggests ways in which an exhibition might continue to play on as a live and collaborative medium.

Video of opening night preview filmed by Evy Samuelsson and Peter Voss-Knude, edited by Peter Voss-Knude