rules and guidelines for the review of artistic concepts for an international exhibition ‘Golden Showers’
Ever since its beginning, the history of art has seen depictions of urination, for example in Lorenzo Lotto’s paintings. There is a lot of symbolism that is strongly associated with urination. In alchemy, both water and urine are referred to as prima materia — the most fundamental matter of the universe, which depth psychology describes as a state of conscious chaos that marks the beginning of the process of individualisation. Recent years have seen the emergence of new ways of portraying a body in art, changing artists’ attitude and experience of bodily fluids. Now, urine is more than a means of expressing dissent; it reveals the primordial intimacy of an artist, triggering reflection on the limitations of ‘I’ in an encounter with ‘the other’, that is — a dark, animal side of our selves. The starting point for the concept of this exhibition is Sigmund Freud’s theory relating to faeces in dreams, which he considered to be triggered by sexual stimuli — a regression to an infantile form of (urethral) eroticism. Freud’s follower, a Bulgarian linguist Julia Kristeva, who is mostly known for coining the term abjection — a word which is synonymous to ‘revulsion’ — developed this idea further Curators intend to make a multi-layered presentation of the issue of bodily secretions, and to break down the social taboo surrounding human physiology. The crux of the exhibition lies in focusing solely on the act of urinating, not on the result, which is urine. Depending on the perspective, this act could be understood as a symbol of fertility, or of revolution.
Works that will be presented in this exhibition should encourage reflection and raise questions rather than provide straight answers.
The exhibition will be divided into three sections:
1. Historical presentation — an alternative view of the history of art, reproductions and documents
2. The present time — reproductions/works that have been created in the last 25 years
3. Projects of topical and future interests — a review of contemporary artists whose works fall within the subject of this exhibition.
