nadiye , Calla Henkel, Max Pitegoff, Milda Januševičiūté, Raimundas Malašauskas, Gaile Pranckunaite, Viktor Sundman, Nene Tsuboi, Åbäke , Stephen Webb, Rachel Mcintosh, Miša Skalskis, Jaakko Pallasvuo, Bedwyr Williams: Bar None

Bar None

This exhibition was supposed to be titled after a real bar, a 691 kilometer ride away from where I’m writing this text. The bar is behind the sea. My e-mail to the barkeepers, asking to borrow the name of their bar might have been lost in their spam folder. And then I had second thoughts about borrowing the name, too. I’ve only been to that bar once. What a cool bar, I thought.

The afterparty of a solo exhibition took place at the cool bar whose name I couldn’t borrow. There was an array of beautiful and tasty spreads and enough free drinks, but the bread ran out too soon. There was nothing to spread the spreads on, and no one nominated themselves to go buy more bread. At the time I thought no one wanted to lower themselves. No one wanted to stoop to the level of bread handler.

That presented itself to me as a great mystery, and a key to understanding something about the cool bar and the city the bar was situated in. In hindsight I can understand how I read way too much into the situation because of the tricky mental state I was in at the time.

It did not occur to me that despite being a visitor to the city, a first time visitor to the cool bar, I could have, as well as anyone, gone out and bought more bread. I can still see the beautiful spreads, sponsored by the artist’s gallerist, going to waste on a white-cloth-table on the makeshift terrace of the cool bar.

This is an uncurated exhibition. I have been invited by SIC to invite other artists to take part. I am an inviting artist. Because the exhibition is uncurated, it doesn’t have a theme in the way a dissertation or a tightly wound novel might have a theme. But it could, maybe, have a theme in the way a bleary song playing on the radio of a rental car on a highway at night has one.

The theme is bread, rooms, letters, the people in the rooms. The theme is Berlin, Vilnius, Helsinki. The theme is there is a kind of social glow here, an iridescent shimmer, that is impossible to package and present to the outside. There is a zero growth golden age happening that is interspersed with continuous global bleakness and bursts of eschatological light.

The theme is everything people do to survive and to make a scene possible. The theme is always scene, glamour and vibe. The theme is five loaves and two fish. The theme is white plastic garden chairs and room temperature boxed wine. The theme is typography, architecture and television. The theme is opera. The theme is friends and frenemies. The theme is charisma and anti-charisma.

There must be a bar, or multiple bars, called Bar None, in the world. This exhibition is not borrowing the name from any of these existing bars. ”Bar none” is an idiom that means: without exception. Bar None is a group exhibition at SIC, featuring nadiye, Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff, Liudmila (Milda Januševičiūtė & Miša Skalskis),  Raimundas Malašauskas, Gailė Pranckūnaitė, Viktor Sundman, Bedwyr Williams, Åbäke & Nene Tsuboi, Stephen Webb, Rachel McIntosh, Miša Skalskis & Jaakko Pallasvuo.

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