Online action:
"Assange Situation - Emergency", Miltos Manetas, 2020
December 18, 2020 – January 31, 2021
How can leaking important digital data boost activist, artistic action? How can the public participate in all this, in conditions of pandemic and self-restraint? The online action entitled "Assange Situation - Emergency" by the visual artist Miltos Manetas attempts this connection, organized by the MOMus-Experimental Arts Center, from December 18, 2020 to January 31, 2021, with an open invitation to the public.
Australian publisher and internet activist Julian Assange, often cited as the founder of WikiLeaks (2006), faces charges of espionage, data theft, computer hacking, and the publication of U.S. military documents. by WikiLeaks, accusations that have led to his imprisonment until the decision to extradite him or not to the USA.
Miltos Manetas, an artist who deals with digital networks and perceives the Internet not as a medium, but as a space, having defined websites as the most radical and important art objects created today ("Websites Are The Art Of Our Times", 1999), continues his online activity, producing artworks as long as Assange's days in prison. After the daily digital posting of works and their free distribution by the artist to the first internet visitor-viewer who declares his desire to acquire them, the MOMus-Experimental Arts Center reverses its role and invites the public to host works from the "Assange Situation - Emergency" series in its private space, participating in the online action of distribution and exhibition of works of art. The participants in the action can state the day and time of the online visit of the audience and the artist Miltos Manetas to their place, thus creating "a home for Assange" and promoting the dialogue around the action. The works that will be reproduced will be exhibited, if conditions allow, at the MOMus-Experimental Arts Center in Warehouse B1, in the port of Thessaloniki, along with those exhibited at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni Museum in Rome in 2019.
Pending a court decision on whether or not to extradite him to the United States, the MOMus-Experimental Arts Center "disseminates but also participates in the free circulation of information and art and highlights, through different confinements of each one, the participation in the circulation of information, how this information becomes a work in the age of Globalization, as well as the special relationship that develops through the communicating vessels 'public-private, private-public' and sends an internet hosting message, in the age of global inclusion”, notes the curator of the action Dorothea Konteletzidou.
As part of the online action, an online discussion will be organized on Friday 22 January 2021. Details will be announced soon.
Steps to participate in the action:
- Expression of interest in info.experimental@momus.gr
- Download the electronic link with the works of Miltos Manetas.
- Selection, printing of a work(s) in any dimension and material one wishes and hanging it/them in any part of his / her private space.
- Update at info.experimental@momus.gr with the day and time of the public online visit via zoom (indicative days & hours to choose from: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, 18:00-20:00).
- Send a photographic documentation of the installation, based on instructions.
Credits
Direction of online event & discussion: Thouli Misirloglou, Acting director of MOMus-Experimental Arts Center
Curation of online event: Dorothea Konteletzidou, Art Historian-Theorist
Production of online event: Domna Gounari, curator of MOMus-Experimental Center of Arts
Production of online discussion: Irini Papakonstantinou, curator of MOMus-Experimental Center of Arts
