The Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home

A Key to UTOPIA
2008
installation

The Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home has made up a UTOPIA of its own. Your own personal key to UTOPIA has been cut and sixty-eight invitations sent out. Anyone is welcome. Pick up a key and emigrate to Utopia with Wizz Air, SkyEurope, British Airways or Croatia Airlines to Liverpool, European Capital of Culture for 2008 where all your dreams of culture and capitalism come true.

This installation invites the audiences to contemplate an imaginary Utopia. The keys are the real keys to the Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home, in Liverpool, UK. However, they are also an illusion. The Institute is not utopian; it is a practical artists-led initiative for Liverpool, UK in 2008. Whilst in the eyes of the “East/Non-EU countries”, the West might be seen as a utopian land of plenty, in reality things are very different. The key to the Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home will only get you inside a council house in a deprived area of Liverpool. However, if you are to get inside the house, you might find a glimpse of our very own anarchic feminist utopian dream… With the key comes a promise: you have an open invitation to visit the Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home – you can open the door yourself!

The Institute is based in Liverpool, UK – a city currently holding the status of European Capital of Culture. This is something that we, as a family of activists as well as residents of the city, are very critical of. We are well aware of the capitalism of culture and the way how culture operates within the capitalist market. The Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home was set up in 2007 as a critical response to Liverpool08, what we have come to call ‘The Capitalism of Culture’. The Institute is run from an area thought of as suffering social and economic depravation and culturally unproductive.

This installation UTOPIA, as spelled out by the keys of the Institute and nailed to the wall of the building, affords the curators and audiences a set of playful questions around a West/East dichotomy. Furthermore, in relation to the overall curatorial vision of the exhibition, which proposes to intervene in the ideas of institutionalized Revolution, this particular installation makes a paradox of the offering of the actual keys to Utopia.

This piece comes out of a desire to fasten two spectres together that have been haunting the Institute since its inception. Firstly, the spectre of the free markets (which are anything but free) imposed upon the “poor relations” of Eastern Europe (and the rest of the world) by the West. The Institute is half Croatian, half British. Secondly, the spectre of cultural capital accrued from the production of artworks for an international market of galleries and venues. Here we are interested in getting our hands on the deep, dense materiality of our social and political relations – especially in terms of being half British and half Croatian exhibiting work from Liverpool in Zagreb. In other words we wish to engage in a politicized critique of our spectres, a critique that questions the ghosts that haunt our spaces, not to vanquish them (we’re not ghost-busters) but to make them visible.

Our hope is that fastening together these two spectres will make each of them more visible. But spectres are translucent so the job of fastening is a difficult one. Where do you start if you can’t see what you’re working with? One place to start was the actual material production of the piece hanging in the gallery. One master key, a set of instructions, sixty-eight nails, sixty-eight keys, some propaganda pamphlets and one UTOPIA in a council house in Liverpool. A conversation developed between the Institute and the Salon of the Revolution about how the piece could best tackle the issues raised in its own production, from the East to the West and back to the East. The outsourcing of labour, the circulation of symbolic and cultural capital, the multifunctionality of the curators and artists and the exploitation that inevitably occurs between affluent and non-affluent parties were some of the themes that emerged through this dialogue. The curators agreed to work as outsourced labourers: to copy the master key sixty-eight times, to hang the piece on the wall, to produce the photocopies of the pamphlet. All instructions were given from Liverpool to Zagreb by email. But this isn’t just about cost-cutting, it is also about the opening up of the relationship between the arts venue and the artists so that the relationship is not one of exploitation but of convivial collaboration. It has been crucial for both the Institute and Salon for the Revolution to remain cognizant of the political, social and cultural implications of their relationship.

So, just as the West requires the opening up of markets of Eastern Europe we felt it useful to think about the opening up of our own western-based Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home to audiences from the East. Take a key to Utopia and emigrate!

The Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home (www.twoaddthree.org) is run out of the third bedroom in a council house in Liverpool and is self-sufficient and sustainable initiative drawing from 10% of all income from it members. The initiative is not supported by Liverpool 08, European Capital of Culture but was in part set up in retaliation to it. The Institute is interested in social transformation and has refigured a part of the family living space into a meeting place for artists, activists and cultural dissenters. This activity is undertaken in order to develop and extend dialogues about our “culture” not necessarily driven by market forces.