Other Rooms, Other Thoughts
“One’s life is peculiar to one’s own when one has invented it.”
Djuna Barnes
With the Project Other Rooms, Other Thoughts, artQ13 is initiating a new experimental platform for artistic activity and exchange in the midst of the corona pandemic. This intercultural and multidisciplinary project is being realized independently of the art business in various sites throughout the world. Other Rooms, Other Thoughts begins on 2022 with an exhibition in a clay pot shop in Kalamulla, Sri Lanka.
The pandemic has confined us within our own four walls. The feeling of isolation was, and still is, desolate. Due to the contact limitations, we have become aware of the value as well as the vitality and potential of our human capacity for relationships.
As a small project space, artQ13 has been continually struggling to stay afloat. Now, in the great global crisis, the existential question is being posed once again in a fundamental way: How can we make ourselves useful and, with our work, make a contribution to life? What concepts and initiatives are we able to develop in this situation? The answer is: We have to invent life. We are aware that we ourselves can only invent life and art in exchange with others and other things.
For this reason, it is our goal to embrace the world as much as possible in order to “find again” our dear friends with whom contact has become rarer due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. At a time when the entire cultural sector has been hard hit and appears to collapse in places, we have thus decided to expand as a project space. We want to grow and become larger in an ironic way—much the same way financially strong international galleries customarily do. With the intercultural project Other Rooms, Other Thoughts, we desire to return to our artQ13 activities—however, not along the path artists normally take when they introduce their art into the existing art system and connect with other art realities. Rather, it is our intention to create new human relationships or intensify them, and thus confront life itself in all its different forms—by doing this in an artistic way.
We have chosen intentionally the sites for this project far away from the customary art routes and centers. The first branch spaces will open in Kalamulla/Sri Lanka, Paris/France, Bucharest /Romania, Kharhiv/Ukraine. These exhibition sites are not the typical white cubes you find for art, but (private) spaces, also outside spaces, connected with contact persons in the respective countries. All works will be carried out on location by persons who have nothing to do with contemporary art and the art business. Under such premises we aim to initiate new forms of non-invasive cooperation.
The project begins in Sri Lanka with the installation The Travels and Adventures of Serendip.[1] This work was created already ten years ago by Carlo Caloro, when he met Nilanka in Rome. The latter, a Sri Lankan, had been looking for work and a residence permit in Rome at the time. Tying in with this socio-cognitive process referenced already in the happy chance of “Serendipity”, something which also distinguishes the entire project due to the external circumstances, Carlo Caloro came up with a work back then that is now to be shown and expanded upon in a household goods shop in Kalamulla.
We understand Other Rooms, Other Thoughts to be an experiment that consciously includes accidental moments as well as the possibility for failure. The worlds we wish to bring together with our project are geographically far apart, and also separated by borders of a religious, moral and cultural nature. Other Rooms, Other Thoughts has been conceived as an open dialogue. There are no requirements regarding the theme, there is only the rule of mutual respect: for the other culture and for the respective counterpart. Perhaps something new will arise from the differences in this process of communication. Or something shared may be found among the differences.
[1] The title refers to the publication: Robert K. Merton, Elinor Barber: The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity. A study of sociological Semantics and the Sociology of Science, Princeton University Press 2003. The exhibition title is a play on words that changes Serendipity to Serendip, which means Sri Lanka in Arabic and Persian.
“One’s life is peculiar to one’s own when one has invented it.”
Djuna Barnes
With the Project Other Rooms, Other Thoughts, artQ13 is initiating a new experimental platform for artistic activity and exchange in the midst of the corona pandemic. This intercultural and multidisciplinary project is being realized independently of the art business in various sites throughout the world. Other Rooms, Other Thoughts begins on 2022 with an exhibition in a clay pot shop in Kalamulla, Sri Lanka.
The pandemic has confined us within our own four walls. The feeling of isolation was, and still is, desolate. Due to the contact limitations, we have become aware of the value as well as the vitality and potential of our human capacity for relationships.
As a small project space, artQ13 has been continually struggling to stay afloat. Now, in the great global crisis, the existential question is being posed once again in a fundamental way: How can we make ourselves useful and, with our work, make a contribution to life? What concepts and initiatives are we able to develop in this situation? The answer is: We have to invent life. We are aware that we ourselves can only invent life and art in exchange with others and other things.
For this reason, it is our goal to embrace the world as much as possible in order to “find again” our dear friends with whom contact has become rarer due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. At a time when the entire cultural sector has been hard hit and appears to collapse in places, we have thus decided to expand as a project space. We want to grow and become larger in an ironic way—much the same way financially strong international galleries customarily do. With the intercultural project Other Rooms, Other Thoughts, we desire to return to our artQ13 activities—however, not along the path artists normally take when they introduce their art into the existing art system and connect with other art realities. Rather, it is our intention to create new human relationships or intensify them, and thus confront life itself in all its different forms—by doing this in an artistic way.
We have chosen intentionally the sites for this project far away from the customary art routes and centers. The first branch spaces will open in Kalamulla/Sri Lanka, Paris/France, Bucharest /Romania, Kharhiv/Ukraine. These exhibition sites are not the typical white cubes you find for art, but (private) spaces, also outside spaces, connected with contact persons in the respective countries. All works will be carried out on location by persons who have nothing to do with contemporary art and the art business. Under such premises we aim to initiate new forms of non-invasive cooperation.
The project begins in Sri Lanka with the installation The Travels and Adventures of Serendip.[1] This work was created already ten years ago by Carlo Caloro, when he met Nilanka in Rome. The latter, a Sri Lankan, had been looking for work and a residence permit in Rome at the time. Tying in with this socio-cognitive process referenced already in the happy chance of “Serendipity”, something which also distinguishes the entire project due to the external circumstances, Carlo Caloro came up with a work back then that is now to be shown and expanded upon in a household goods shop in Kalamulla.
We understand Other Rooms, Other Thoughts to be an experiment that consciously includes accidental moments as well as the possibility for failure. The worlds we wish to bring together with our project are geographically far apart, and also separated by borders of a religious, moral and cultural nature. Other Rooms, Other Thoughts has been conceived as an open dialogue. There are no requirements regarding the theme, there is only the rule of mutual respect: for the other culture and for the respective counterpart. Perhaps something new will arise from the differences in this process of communication. Or something shared may be found among the differences.
[1] The title refers to the publication: Robert K. Merton, Elinor Barber: The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity. A study of sociological Semantics and the Sociology of Science, Princeton University Press 2003. The exhibition title is a play on words that changes Serendipity to Serendip, which means Sri Lanka in Arabic and Persian.