ALEJANDRO VIDAL AND CARLES CONGOST OPENING IN LONDON NEXT JUNE

"You`ve got everything here and out there it's so dark" will open next 9th June at Civic Room, it is the first collaboration between Barcelona based artists Carles Congost and Alejandro Vidal, highlighting common areas that exist in their works and exploring their own interests and goals. Alejandro Vidal and Carles Congost explores in this exhibition issues of collective insecurity and the fear of the other. Thus the origins of fear ,the trivialization of pain, new representations and strategies of terror and its overexposure in the home environment, youth conflict with the first form of government, the family and mechanisms of control through the implementation of a state of fear have been recurrent themes in their recent work, being approached from very different perspectives and through multiple formal strategies.

Fear has become an essential tool for managing control from the firstcore, the family, to the highest elite of state politics. In any of these estates, it is necessary to present our inhabited spaces as a safe dignified place, in a situation of constant threat,there’s a menace that always comes from outside and therefore we can only avoid it or fight it. The culture of fear has help governments and those ruling the power to control the disorder. It’s done promoting the implementation of an ultra-protectionist system that justifies the deactivation of the civilliberties. These measures only create anxiety and a sense of loss in the individual. The new fears, some irrational, have led to increased patriotism and even dangerous military adventures anywhere in the world. Besides other works in the exhibition the installation "A Tale For Wild-Eyed Boys" (2010) will be the first joint effort between the artists, made specifically for this project. Through the manipulation of various publications and objects, Vidal and Congost built a sort of camp-shelter on the floor of the gallery, filled with references and symbolism, suggesting the existence of alternative communities, beyond the narrow confines imposed by the establishment, offering a survival exercise outside of the boundaries separating the “inside” the “outside” the “I” of the “other” in our society. In the installation we will find very personal referents that are animportant part of the vocabulary of both artists: self-defense manual,references to the dark world of sects and secret societies as well as allusions to music as a vehicle to build communities outside the family order. A place where monsters exist only so far as we are afraid of them.

Civic Room, 50 Acton mews, London E8 SEA UK info@civicroom.org.uk