Kadist Art Foundation presents Like an Attali Report, but different

Like an Attali Report, but different: On fiction and political imagination is exhibiting between June 15 and July 27 at the Kadist Art Foundation.

The Attali Report (or the Report of the Commission for the Liberation of French Growth), commissioned by President Sarkozy, was published half a year ago, provoking a long series of discussions, mainly confined to the French public arena and mainly focused on the report's concrete proposals, set to implement a neoliberal model for the French economy and society. But the Attali Report is a surprisingly interesting text, especially in its emphatic high brow literary introduction, being one of the first major instances where the neoliberal system is asserted beyond the rather discreet discourse of the "necessary reforms" through which it has insinuated itself since the eighties. It is now invested with the value of a concrete historical paradigm, of a describable era of revolutionary novelty, making the Attali Report a relevant document for the current attempts to imagine a dominant narrative representing and organizing the scope of our global system.

However, this exhibition is neither about the Attali Report nor is it a report itself. It does, nonetheless, try to unfold fictions and images that offer an insight on different narratives that have been overlapping for the past decades in our thinking of politics, at different times and in different localities. It refers to the disintegration of the communist utopia and some images, passions, stories and reactions that came along with this process; it visits the meeting of fiction and Utopian thinking on both sides of the Iron Curtain; it mentions some processes of exoticization and nation building; it acknowledges the formation of communities of struggle and resistance. But the works don't passively present such narratives, they alter them and participate - albeit indirectly - to their fabrication. The exhibition works at this point of interaction between story telling and political imagination, a knot that encapsulates the political potential of art as an agent of represen tation. It brings together these occurrences and positions, sometimes contradictory, sometimes doubtful and sometimes passionately engaged and determined.

The reference to the Attali report on the state of France, a highly specific and local anchor, is used to take the discussion into a wider perspective, to mark the moments and the blockages - as well as some parallel areas of articulation - that have contributed to the current crisis in the imagination of a language and a scope for politics.

The exhibition is accompanied by interventions of writers and critics and by a film program that reiterates a few lines of the exhibition, using the cinematic language and its potentials.

For more information visit www.kadist.org

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