Performing the Fringe
Performing the Fringe evolved over the artists’ and curators’ collective hikes in three different contexts in the rural–urban fringe areas of the cities of Pori, Stockholm and Vilnius. Hiking unfolded as a common activity that combines walking, observation, talking and engaging with regional specificities while also serving as a tool for researching and understanding local contexts. Experiences in these environments and the artists’ research processes that evolved from the hikes have materialised into artistic commissions.
The discursive frame of the exhibition is based on anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's writings on ‘pericapitalism’. The term refers to spaces and activities on the fringes of capitalism and the consumer society and to the potential futures formed by them. Pericapitalism can involve all sort of activities from foraging and selling natural products to collecting recyclable bottles, as well as sharing economy. The exhibition views Nordic and Baltic urban-rural areas as pericapitalist spaces of emerging new human and non-human agencies and narratives for survival in the current crisis.
The project brings together artistic practices as ways of exposing and embodying non-human histories, post-neoliberal urban activities, non-industrial food production, allotment garden towns, and other small-scale economic and ecological activities. It challenges the normalised divisions of function/non-function, human/non-human and productive/non-productive, to open up hybrid and merged notions about contemporary rural-urban spaces, and the agencies forming within them.
The exhibition Performing the Fringe at Pori Art Museum is the second presentation of the project, the first was on view at Konsthall C in Stockholm in the spring and summer of 2020.
Artists: Lara Almarcegui, Kipras Dubauskas, Valentina Karga, Flo Kasearu, Michèle Matyn, Andrej Polukord, Asbjørn Skou, Urban Fauna Lab, Jon Benjamin Tallerås, Ore.e Refineries
curated by Jussi Koitela and Inga Lāce
When? Where?
30 April - 26 September 2021
Pori Art Museum
Eteläranta
28100 Pori, Finland