Pan-demonium
Curated by bricolagekitchen

Pan-demonium resonates with the current global political, ecological and economic situation – one in which the hegemonic forces of order have been overwhelmed by a dynamic of chaos and disorder, turning the world ‘upside-down’. Maybe Pan-demonium offers a metaphor for a critique of global capitalism and its ‘devils’ – its pan-demons – in all their guises (pan-demics included)? Or perhaps it conjures up collective creative forces for political challenge and the re-inscription of Pan in contemporary mythology?

bricolagekitchen invited visual, sonic and written responses to some of these ideas and questions. Bricolage has various histories and contexts– from Claude Levi-Strauss on anthropology to Steven Connor on postmodern culture. John Cage’s explorations of indeterminacy and the polarities of random/order have an obvious relevance here. Michel Serres’ ideas on noise, clamour and cacophony and Michel de Certeau’s leaky ‘sieve order’ also lurk behind the concept of the project. Serres writes about ‘fuzzy logic’ but ‘mess’ is increasingly being cited as a new paradigm in research methodology and is being transposed to other disciplines and creative practices.

Through an exploration of the multiple meanings, interpretations and understandings of Pan-demonium, this exhibition hopes to open up political as well as aesthetic potentialities. It brings together an assembled cacophony of over fifty contemporary artistic responses and global voices gleaned via the web in a panorama of sound, text, visual and moving imagery,  celebrating the affective power of disorder and noise. Pan-demonium explores the idea of randomness and mess through the adoption of bricolage in a makeshift bricologue of interactive presentation and responses. 

Check out the catalog for Pan-demonium published by AC books.

About the Curator
bricolagekitchen, aka Gillian Whiteley, is an interdisciplinary artist-curator-writer working across critical-creative borders and currently based at Loughborough University School of Art and Design, UK. Her wide-ranging creative/research interests have a focus on the use of ‘trash’ in visual/material culture and improvisational and collaborative practices. She has researched, published and curated a number of projects linking art and bricolage, junk assemblage and the politics of the social, public and affective imagination. Exhibitions includeRadical Mayhem: Welfare State International and its Followers (UK, 2008), related forthcoming publications include Junk : Art and the Politics of Trash (IB Tauris), Scavenging from margins to mainstream?

bricolagekitchen.com

Image and text courtesy the artist.