The Athens Biennial states its intention plainly, its press release is an invitation for artists and viewers to participate in consideration of the concept ‘anti’. Here anti is detached from any context: site, time, history, politics, it is only an image of a word, one devoid of any substantive that would give that word some meaning or position.
The remit of the Biennale proposes to viewers both a consideration of the concept anti and of the concept of opposition: but here ’opposition’ is redefined, as post-possibility, now merely an ‘attitude’, non conformity - now detached from any sustaining criticality, and ‘marginality’ which is to be considered without social history, without the mention of the real life effects of the contemporary context of ever rising fascism. It offers no solidarity. Contemporary fascist iconography adorns the website, talk of reaction peppers the press release as a vague oscillating prop constructed to disorientate the participants in some bullshit larping exercise that attempts to pass as a sincere cultural event grappling with the alt right, a bit.
The designs of the curatorial management team state brazenly that they will produce the intimate proximity of a lubricated ‘embodied pleasure’ which will be mediated through their convenient equivocation of revolt with reaction. In this art space, by design, there is no possibility for anti fascism, for a politics of solidarity that is informed by its active political opposition to fascism, for anti fascist cultural praxis, for the desire to recognise and so then challenge the real effects of an ever faster re-consolidating global far-right.
Its remit sustains a total refusal to recognise those immediately effected, in the here and now, by fascism’s rise - minorities: the racialised, the poor, migrants , people living impossible, illegal and invisible lives, facing brutal hardship, fear and death. The migration office is listed as just another space for viewers to indulge in, in non opposition, likened to a dating website or a tattoo parlour. Or a gym or some other irrelevant site. No difference.
Its impossible not to see the political stances, ambitions and effects of this middle management middle class curatorial vision, a badly designed cultural exploration into the living hell of live action far right reactionary apologism and cultural production (at best) even despite its pathetic assumption of a very thin disguise of principled anti censorship. The curatorial team purports to challenge bigotry and intolerance: they do this by offering a platform to and rushing to the defence of an artist who has consistently aligned himself with anti-Semites, fascist trolls and alt right groups online, and has consistently baited anti fascist campaign groups, arguing that his efforts are to be considered as both art and as useful research, further that they should be defended. The curators claim to take the threat of fascism seriously, have claimed their to opposition to fascism in their defense of Daniel Keller, yet all they do is play with fascist culture, act as its detached administrators and defend its apologists. They have smeared those under real threat resulting from public opposition to fascist cultural projects as a trivialisation.