Transmission Interrupted

“When potential catastrophes are prevented from taking place, is that a bad thing? When wars and revolutions rupture the continuous flow of everyday life, is this a good thing? When a paradigm or status quo is broken, opening up the space for new ideas and ways of thinking, is this a bad thing? There is a hint of violence in the act of interruption and the possibility that what is interrupted may never be resumed and even if it is resumed – the conversation restarted, the broadcast carried on, the machinery of everyday life re-continued the temporary cessation and its memory will always be there. The act of interruption breaks the continuity of time and space, separating what happened in the past from what will happen in the future. An interruption creates an interval which frequently elicits the desire for the narrative to be continued and at the same time provokes the possibility that things may not continue in the same way as they have done before.  The artists in Transmission Interrupted, in different ways, intervene in the continuous narrative that surrounds us – the unyielding rhetoric of politicians, the changing, short-lived preoccupations of the news media, the fast-moving rhythm of modern life – opening up spaces that disturb the continuity of everyday life and reframe the way in which we see and understand the world. The artworks in Transmission Interrupted are like interjections, breaking the flow of a discussion and, in doing so, changing the direction of the conversation, re-routing it into different territory. But, while there is a politic embedded in these works – in the archaic sense of the term, that is, a concern with how we conduct our lives – they resist the political in a literal or didactic sense, preferring instead to open up a space of interruption which is by turns, poetic, lyrical and unexpected.”

From Gilane Tawadros, ‘Interruption in Four Acts, or Disappearing Irises, Broken-Down Buses and Ceramic Citroens’, in Suzanne Cotter and Gilane Tawadros (eds), Transmission Interrupted, Oxford: Modern Art, Oxford, 2009.

Transmission Interrupted was an exhibition (with an accompanying publication) co-curated by Gilane Tawadros and Suzanne Cotter and presented at Modern Art Oxford between 18 April and 21 June 2009. Participating artists were Adel Abdessemed, Pilar Albarracín, Yto Barrada, Mircea Cantor, Jem Cohen, Jimmie Durham, Simryn Gill, Julia Metzer and David Thorne, Lia Perjovschi, Michael Rakowitz, Ernesto Salmeron, Yara El-Sherbini and Sislej Xhafa.