Models for Taking Part 

If “relate,” “participate” and “interact” have been the driving verbs behind much artwork produced since the late 1990s — and the rise of relational aesthetics in this period seems to indicate as much — then Models for Taking Part, curator Juan A. Gaitán’s exhibition of five works by international artists that interrogate the cohesion of the public sphere, reveals the dark undercurrents of these practices, focusing on states of infiltration, implica-tion and complicity. 

The exhibition offers two possible starting points for the viewer. The first, a noisy introduction through Artur Żmijewski’s Democracies (2009), a 10-screen video installation that simultaneously shows clips from a number of collective actions around the world. By bringing together a cacophony of scenes as diverse as church services, military reenact-ments, anti-globalization demonstrations, political rallies and labour actions, Żmijewski attunes us to the formal similarities in public demon-strations of belief systems: rehearsing, singing, chanting, speech-giving and flag-waving reappear as common methods of expressing what Gaitán describes as “self-affirmation” in the public sphere. Followed by a video by Annetta Mona Chisa and Lucia Tkácová that puts the continued relevance of Charles Darwin’s theories about human evolution to the test in a game of “broken telephone” and a photo and video series by Tobias Zelony exam-ining an Italian public housing project, this route through the exhibition foregrounds moments where meaning breaks down as messages circulate through a collective.