The conditions of the appearance of AyeBaDome are not clear. AyeBaDome is a word of hybrid mutation; the result of autocorrection by a mobile phone’s algorithmic surveillance of its user’s typing habits. Autocorrection and predictive input methods layer language formation with a technologically mediated level of complexity, which creates words that can be used as the new vernacular. AyeBaDome:Super presents an opportunity to usurp the signifying power of this hybrid.
By giving it the status of an open discursive field that functions within the interstitial space of art, an open, non-whole point of enunciation is created. The works in this exhibition create series of fluid differentiality. Working differentially - that is, creating with and whilst immersed in cultural tropes that often appear as the very thing that blocks change- is the contemporary exigency of our being-with. In a society such as the Cypriot one, where the local dialect creates a disjuncture between official and everyday speech, the space for differentiation is continually open and local identities are built on difference. It is this disjuncture that allows the works in this exhibition to raise their demands in a way that reveals what constitutes the innermost convictions and desires that create the shared intersubjective space of society. AyeBeDome is a hybridising sign that challenges us to give time to the works themselves to infiltrate and infect processes of translation and thus change and expand the social conditions of political enunciation.
The diachronic problems of the local art scene and the newly justified blatant exploitation of a growing number of ‘cultural workers’, has stiffled the voice of artists and culture as an active part of society. Natalie Yiaxi submits to AyeBaDome an idea that will be processed as the exhibition unfolds. ‘AAAFAY Donation Station’ paradoxically exists as both a mobile sculpture and a direct course of action, and this dual status will not change once the intensity of the prevailing space allows the dust to settle, as it were. Faced with the donation station, the viewer has a choice. One can express interest, pledge funds or directly donate money for the cause of Adopting An Artist For A Year; or just admire the booth’s aesthetics and walk away. The artist expresses her intentions through a radio campaign, a printed leaflet and a website.
All three borrow from emotive charity commercials but the tone is ironic and exasperatingly funny in equal measure, creating the conditions for a confrontation within codes that feel eerily familiar and thus allow for the problem in question to be discombobulated and made visible. The creation of this ironic charity fund indexes conditions of social and political inequality and provides a platform for artists to create in a way that allows them a degree of freedom and decency. If the idea unfolds in days of retrograde planets then the money raised will be used for the settling of debts incurred for the creation of the campaign and ‘AAAFAY Donation Station’ will stand, as it does now, as a monument to the lack of bread and butter.
︎︎︎
AyeBaDome exhibition text
written by Evagoras Vanezis on the occasion of the group show
AyaBaDome:Super (2015) at Thkio ppalies artist run space, Nicosia
