About Human Emancipation

masc foundation
grundsteingasse 40
1160 wien

8. – 22. November 2019

There is this old fight between the old and young generations where the former struggles and applies authority to preserve the way the things are and the latter introducing changes where it feels like it suits. On itself it is about the struggle between the conservative and progressive thoughts, which sometimes can, when one or both lose wisdom, apply even violence and establish the extreme form of dialogue, the dialogue of ultimatums.

The conservatives call upon preserving the tradition and forgetting that the world is constantly changing any way and it needs adaptation, but in fact it is all about clinging to the privileges and understanding them as the natural state and eternal right. In the most inflexible form and if they are good minded, they in the best case eventually become some kind of Don Quijotes. The progressives on the other hand stand for development, evolution of things, they try to find possible changes that could make life better in some way. But the changes the progressives dream are again a part of discourse of the privileges and while some propagate emancipation and strive for equality, there are others who perceive equality as something obsolete and unjust.

The main motive in the 47 images of the series About human emancipation of Antonio Gritón are photographic portraits the artist has collected from the Internet, portraits that represent the people of leftist political thought, the thought that follows a vision of constant changing that makes the world worth living for everyone. In the computer photomontage technique other photographs or parts of them are added to the portraits to place them in a context and accentuate the main idea behind their activity. Not every progressive idea is good and many of the personalities on these icons are ambivalent today, but the original idea, the initial dream was always dedicated to the emancipation and empowerment of the suppressed.

Most enigmatic are the stripes of colours that shine like rays of spiritual light form their eyes to illuminate the world. Association to the rainbow flag may seem a bit too simple, but it is not entirely banal because its symbolic transports the idea that there is light and life for everyone no matter what they are like and how they want to live. These multicolour rays are the opposite of the duality of black and white n of the greyness of indifference at the same time and they represent vision of creativity without destruction as well. They en/light/en and see. They are the antennas to change the world, as Gritón named his installation in Mexico city and Venice. This series of 47 icons act as upgrade to the installation by adding these personalities to the concept of artist-shaman-activist.

List of portraits:
Charles Fourier, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Federico Engels, Mihail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Vera Zasulich, Vladimir Lenin, Lev Trotsky, Emma Goldman, John Reed, Ricardo Flores Magón, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknetch, Clara Zetkin, Sigmund Freud, Alexandra Kollontall, Victor Sergé, Mao, Enrico Malatesta, Antonio Gramsci, Ho Chi Min, Erich Fromm, George Lukacs, André Bretón, Walter Benjamin, Wilheim Reich, Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez, José Revueltas, Fidel Castro, Ché Guevara, Malcolm X, Angela Davies, Shokley Charmaichel, Huey Newton, Arturo Gamiz, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Bensaid, Ernest Mandel, Herbert Marcuse, John Berger, Michel Lowy, Bolivar Echeverría, Subcomandante Galeano, Pablo González Casanova

As part of:

Dichter Herbst 2019
dedicated to Walter Arlen and the Dichter Family

Artists:
Mara Mattuschka, Eva Brunner-Szabo, Antonio Gritón,  Arno Schmid, Darja Shatalova & Felix Helmut Wagner, Jasmin Hirtl/Philipp Hemmer/Daniel Krammer, Schütz/Helf/Staudinger & helmhart
20 Years MASC  39DADA

VR Artists
Warenhaus Dichter, Gustav Böhm, Karin Sulima, Dieter Brasch, Elvira Faltermeier