T H E S T A T E O F M I N D

t h e s t a t e o f m i n d is a collaborative project that started as an attempt to organize the Lebanese pavilion for the 54th Venice Biennale, but the organizational aspect is part of the project itself; aiming at providing singular opportunities and paradigms for institutional critique.

The Lebanese art scene, is a singularity in the region and provides opportunities for meta-interventions that can spread to regional and interenational art scene through biennials such as the Sharjah and Venice biennials.

Active resistance from the local art scene served to create a participative art project that would end-up representing Lebanon through void; going beyond the Biennale’s administration, and the Lebanese Ministry of Culture, and creating the space for participation right in the middle of the Arsenale, outside of any curatorial or administrative control.

The project draws from Rancière’s of Bourriaud’s convivial relational aesthetics, and the call for dissensus in contemporary art practice. It is also the space of a performative thought process taking place between the people implicated in the project, as well as an archeology of the Lebanese history with the Biennale that started in 2004 with the unsuccessful effort to make the first Lebanese pavilion for the 2005 Biennale with Walid Raad as official artist. This failure in 2011 is a redoing of the 2005 absence, alltthwhile a reference to the 2007 one and only official pavilion (involving the same protagonists again too), not to mention the 2009 absence.

t h e s t a t e o f m i n d  project is designed to be an ongoing ever-growing project creating possibilities for viewers and artists alike to interact accross countries in order to maintain spaces for action above and beyond institutional control, and art market logic. The point of departure has been the Lebanese art scene whose singularity created an opportunity of such an intervention in the local art scene, and through it to spread to the regional art scene, namely the Sharjah biennial, and from there to the international art scene with the creation of a dissensual space in the middle of the Arsenale, that represents Lebanon, allthewhile not being subsumed by the Biennale administration. 

The project’s aim is two-fold:

- Maintaining a self-sustainable space of particiaptive art through new media, and mobile technology.

- Offering news paradigms, and viable opportunities for institutional critique that seems to be an ever more essential part of contemporary art practice in a diversified art market.

The void created in the Arsenale will be available for artistic interventions until the end of the Biennale in November. Parallel to the Venice intervention, participative projects will have to take place in different cities around the world, starting with those associated with the European, American, and Asian art scenes. Collaborations through GPS-enabeled 3G devices, already used in Venice, will be used for actions, and interventions in New York, London, Beijing, Beirut, and Cairo.

The all-too known endorsement process taking place in the art world has to be evaluated against a simple and dynamic definition of the locus of art: if the artwork does not offer ways to participation it is not affordable as artwork. The meta-artistic level exists, and has to be reached through the recursive imperative of ‘art as intervention in art’.

This is  t h e s t a t e o f m i n d.