Venue: Berlaymont Building, Brussels Curator: Sami Jalili This exhibition forms part of and is supported by the European Commisison Framework 6 funded project, CHALLENGE: The Changing Nature of Liberty and Security in Europe and the project's partners, CEPS, Sciences Po, and the Department of War Studies, King's College London. Its focus is on the implications of security-centric policies for the liberal democratic polity, and more abstractedly the conceptual connotations of such processes. Its

more »

... aim is not the dissemination of academic research through a simplistic aesthetic realisation of the problematique, but rather to reveal engagements with these issues in the wider public sphere of discourse. The conventional tendency is to conceive of security and liberty in terms of a balance, a formulaic representation that often legitimises the curtailment of liberties in the name of security. The metaphor of balance also suggests that each element has a distinct and quantifiable value that may be directly measured against the other. Alternatively, the concepts of liberty and security might be conceived of as being mutually constitutive, so that neither has meaning without the other. Questions then arise about the 'politics' of security and about how it acquires contested meanings in the space of the public sphere. It is then no longer a given, taken for granted value, or even end-product, but is rather central to the formulation of politics, to the construction of threat, to the production of unease and anxiety and to the play of power within society. The artists here seek to provide a space for exploring exactly the contested terrain on which we approach these issues in a context that is constantly being framed by discourses of threat and danger. Their contributions may not be seen as political in any conventional sense; there is no crude appropriation and politicization of the art form. Instead, the works pose abstract and hypothetical questions about the state of being and conditions of existence within the free world, and in turn about the production and nature of art and culture in such an environment. Through systematic repetition and semantic dilution the notion of liberty has been rendered anodyne. The aim of this exhibition is thus the exploration of new approaches to representing what is more than ever a fundamental concern, both in life and art.