Why is Everybody Being So Nice: The Power Nap
.Why is Everybody Being So Nice: The Power Nap.
[Stedelijk Museum - Amsterdam, 2017]
With: Apparatus 22 / Johannes Büttner and Benedikte Bjerre in collaboration with Helge Peters / Larisa David in collaboration with Raluca Croitoru / Vera Mey / Nat Muller / Rabea Ridlhammer / Anastasia Shin
Why Is Everybody Being So Nice? is curated by Mira Asriningtyas, Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti, Mateo Chacon-Pino, Kati Ilves, Shona Mei Findlay, Fadwa Naamna
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The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and De Appel Curatorial Programme proudly present Why Is Everybody Being So Nice: The Power Nap. The event concludes the series of events organized by De Appel Curatorial Programme and marks the launch of an online publication alongside a program of performances, readings, and a collective snooze in the auditorium of the museum building. Please bring your pillow and blanket!
Why Is Everybody Being So Nice is a project consisting of public events, performances, and an online publication running from April to June 2017 at various locations in Amsterdam, and investigates the ethical and behavioral codes of conduct in the art world. By exploring gray areas between ethics and etiquette, it considers the art world as a rapidly expanding sector of knowledge-based, post-industrial economies. The program provides horizons to think through and navigate the broader issues of precarious labor within the arts field. The program was enthused by an essay by Martha Rosler on this subject in which she states that: “niceness” is an idea that “speaks to a demand, in neoliberal terms, for the wholesale invention, performance, and perpetual grooming of a transactional self.”
The first part of the project took place at De Appel in April, where it unfolded as a four-day-long program of panel discussions, workshops, screenings, and performances. It ended with a collective sleepover, The Night of Exhaustion and Exuberance, which activated the practice of collective sleeping as a gesture of resistance and appropriation of space and time. Why Is Everybody Being So Nice will continue and conclude with The Power Nap, a collective snooze in the auditorium of the Stedelijk Museum.
As part of Why Is Everybody Being So Nice: The Power Nap, artist collective Apparatus 22 will conduct a performance-workshop Positive Tension (on curating). The performance-workshop will be a celebration with a twist. Its prerequisites are contained in the Positive Tension (curating kit), a brown bag with over 100 questions about curating and relations with audience, artists, institutions, legacies, ethics, new modes of working in arts, future and so on. This set of both serious and playful instructions will turn the work/party into a marathon of critical thinking.
[click this link to read Why is Everybody Being So Nice - Online Publication]