April 3 – 21
Opening Reception: Saturday, April 7, 7-9p
Location: Arts + Literature Laboratory, 2021 Winnebago St, Madison, WI
Arts + Literature Laboratory is proud to announce the recipients of the 2018 ALL Prize, a new exhibition award for third-year graduate students in the UW-Madison Art Department. This new collaboration between ALL and the UW-Madison Art Department provides two outstanding graduating MFA students with an extended exhibition opportunity in the community.
Fikriye Oz’s MFA thesis exhibition, “Slow Death,” will be shown from Tuesday, April 3 through Saturday, April 21, 2018.
“Slow death” refers to the physical wearing down of a population and the deterioration of people in that population that is very nearly a defining condition of their experience and historical existence. The general emphasis of the phrase is on the phenomenon of mass physical attenuation under global/national regimes of capitalist structural subordination and govern-mentality. It takes as its point of departure David Harvey’s polemical observation in “Spaces of hope” that under capitalism the sickness is defined as the inability to work. This powerful observation about the rationalization of health is important part of the story, but it is not the whole story either. Through the space opened up by this concept, I offer a development in the ways we conceptualize contemporary historical experience, especially when that experience simultaneously at an extreme and in zone of ordinariness. Where life building and the attrition of human life are indistinguishable and where it is hard to distinguish the modes of incoherence, distracted ness and the habituation from deliberate and the deliberative activity, as they are all involved in the reproduction of the predictable life.