TIRANA, July 23 – Ten Slovak artists will be featured in Tirana for one month at a collective exhibition called “Strategies and tactics-exhibition of Slovak video art.”
“The main theme of the exhibition, a selection of Slovak contemporary video art, is based on the contraposition of strategy and tactics. Distinctions between them were proposed by French philosopher Michel de Certeau in his book The Practice of Everyday Life (1984),” says curator Lydia Pribisova the curator of the exhibition which will be open at the National Gallery of Art from July 30 to August 31.
“The artists in this show use tactics of their own invention to detect and expose the strategies of mainstream society, and especially its utilitarian strategies. The artists’ counter-actions show empathy, humor and flexibility. Through these instruments, various political strategies are shown to be empty and self-referential. As the control of strategy is never perfect, art is helping to find these gaps in the system,” says the curator.
According to philosopher de Certeau, the development of strategy emanates the purview of power. The exercise of strategy is connected with a place that can be circumscribed as a proper and thus serves as a basis for generating relations with exterior subjects. He argues that tactics are opposed to strategy. The place of tactics belongs to the other. So since the user of tactics has no base, tactics depend on time. That means flexibility, a combination of heterogeneous elements.
In contrast to strategy, de Certeau claims, tactics are the purview of the non-powerful. Tactics are more an adaptation to the environment, which has been created by the strategies of the powerful. It implies the creative processes as sharing and cooperation. Tactics are more partial, more contingent, consisting of adequate negotiation of the moment; they are the methods of the minority, actions that are intentional yet intuitive, and often more elastic and exploratory in relation to the objective. They are in a permanent and constant state of reassessment and correction, says the curator.
The exhibition reflects an ongoing collaboration between the National Gallery of Arts and the White House Biennial, an international artistic platform based in Athens, Greece.
