EXHIBITION

Bric à brac : The Jumble of Growth

Today Art Museum, Beijing, Beijing, 12/10/2016 - 03/05/2017

Pingod Community, No.32 Baiziwan Road

ABOUT

This exhibition for Today Art Museum’s third Documents aims to explore the process of global economic, social and cultural transformations that the boom of emerging market economies has introduced. It will try to examine various ways in which art has participated in or reacted to some of the transitions involved, and to their effects on culture, society and the individual. The French expression bric-à-brac is broadly employed to mean jumble, odds and ends, or an uneven group of things, with a certain undertone of confusion. The first word of this idiom coincides by chance with the acronym BRIC – Brazil (7th world economy), Russia (13th), India (6th) and China (2nd) –, launched in 2001 by economist Jim O’Neill to discuss the major global economic role played by these four countries. Despite their current slowdown, the BRICs are the largest emerging market economies in the world, and account for more than 25% of the world’s land area and more than 40% of its population. The acronym has come into widespread use to epitomize a historic process that is taking place: the dramatic increase of global economic power of the developing world, which has come to play a leading international role in the post-Cold War era. This shift is a decisive outcome of globalization that is reshaping the world and therefore having a planetary impact not only in economy, but also in politics, society, the environment, culture and life. It is changing the way in which modernity and colonialism have structured the world. Traditional divisions between First and Third Worlds have exploded, giving way to a mixed, more decentralized distribution of roles. The new situation not only involves the BRIC countries, but many other emerging economies in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. Even though some of these economies are suffering the general constraints in today’s world economy, they have changed the global status quo – and its chart of power – forever, and continue to transform it. Large market economies are emerging from critical situations of underdevelopment in countries that have undergone economic growth accompanied by fast, uneven modernizations. The classical historical scheme of enlightenment, development and modernization has not been the route for the former Third World to grow: it experiences unorthodox processes full of contrasts of every kind. Many of these societies are postcolonial ones that have been already dealing with inequalities, ambiguities and hybridizations inherent to the postcolonial condition. While macro-economies grow, infrastructures are build, modernization and internationalization advance, massive irregular urbanization spreads (two thirds of the world’s urban population live now in emerging and underdeveloped countries), and global power relations change, sharp contrasts prevail in society. Serious income discrepancies in many of these nations aggravate their low per-capita income levels, in spite of PIB’s growth. All these processes amount for drastic social inequalities that foster crime and political instability. Such problems add to the coexistence of different historical times (concomitance of modern, feudal and even tribal stages), frictions between swiftly imposed modernization and traditional life, metamorphic cultural mutations entailed in massive demographic displacements from traditional rural environments to cities, use of high-tech facilities within pre-modern contexts, as well as many other contrasts. However, a very fruitful rise in the size of the middle class is taking place. Even if still low, personal income has increased over previous averages, improving the life standards of millions of people, although critical poverty remains.

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APT ARTISTS ON VIEW

Kendell Geers
Mounir Fatmi

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