On Saturday 22 November, the Van Abbemuseum opens the exhibition Confessions of the Imperfect, 1848 – 1989 – Today.

Confessions of the Imperfect is an exhibition on art, design, life and work, structured as a practical and experiential survey of the modern world. The exhibition presents a diverse mix of historical material, design and contemporary art projects to reflect on but also to use. It takes its title from the Romantic art critic and social reformer John Ruskin, who in Stones of Venice (1869) presented a holistic and ecological view on the relation between art and life as a perpetual and necessary struggle with human imperfection. He developed this vision as a critique of industrialising and capitalist societies that tried to resolve human imperfection through standardised forms of production and government. Instead of worrying about the outcome, however, Ruskin suggests we should focus on the process. How can we live life artfully and experience work not only as toil for reward, but as an organic part of a total social and ecological system of life and work? This question inspires this exhibition to take an unusual tour through modern times.

To structure such a tour two markers are set: 1848 and 1989. Two revolutions: the first is represented by a symbol of the barricade during the February Revolution in France and the second by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Both revolutions marks moments of radical social change, but also the perseverance of a society in which material gain is placed higher than an artfully lived life. 1848 did not inaugurate the rise of the worker or the proletariat, which Marx and Engels imagined in their Communist Manifesto. Instead it marked, as historian Eric Hobsbawn stated, the start of the Age of Capital. 1989 on the other end did not mark the victory of liberal democracy over communism, but inaugurated a multi-polar, globalism of which the current, increasingly unstable geopolitical moment is the uncomfortable preliminary end point. Liberation and emancipation almost seamlessly transferred into colonization and exploitation. In the exhibition the constant fluid transition from one to the other, is a red thread to make visible and explore.

Confessions of the Imperfect invites the visitor to actively and playfully consider where and how moments of emancipation or escape are followed up by moments of colonial capture. Departing from the present the exhibition explores how traces from past histories linked to emancipation and capture reappear perpetually in our environment. The main architecture for this journey is provided by Liam Gillick, who has produced a series of interventions in the galleries that draw on the physical and conceptual form of the barricade. Within the exhibition, the barricade is repeatedly warped and reshaped, corresponding to the way in which the divide between emancipation and colonization is also constantly redeployed but never completely overcome.

For more information on Confessions of the Imperfect you can visit www.vanabbemuseum.nl
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Artists
Constant, Jeremy Deller, Fernando García-Dory, Liam Gillick, Renzo Martens, Antoni Miralda, Li Mu, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Alexandra Pirici & Manuel Pelmus, John Ruskin, Static, Akram Zaatari

Curators
Alistair Hudson (Grizedale Arts), Steven ten Thije (Van Abbemuseum)

Collaboration partners
The exhibition is part of the five-year programme The Uses of Art – on the legacy of 1848 and 1989, organised by the museum confederation L’Internationale. The exhibition is developed by the Van Abbemuseum and Grizedale Arts.

Funders
The exhibition Confessions of the Imperfect, 1848 – 1989 – Today is made possible with the support of Mondriaan Fund, the Culture Programme of the European Union and the Romanian Cultural Institute.

Image may be NSFW.
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