System of a Down at Ellis King

Artists: Vito Acconci, Yuji Agematsu, Lutz Bacher, Nanni Balestrini, Jordan Belson, Jason Benson, Nicolas Ceccaldi, Olga Chernysheva, Cindie Cheung, Francisco Cordero-Oceguera, Dunne and Raby, Horacio Garcia-Rossi, Yngve Holen, Alain Jacquet, Jean-Paul Jungmann, Morag Keil, Quasar Khanh, Sam Lipp, Emanuele Marcuccio, Erin Jane Nelson, Puppies Puppies, Aldo Rossi, Lisa Ruyter, Hayley Silverman, Michael E. Smith, Zhou Tao, Zoe Zenghelis

Exhibition title: System of a Down

Organised by: Francisco Cordero-Oceguera, Michele D’Aurizio, Emanuele Marcuccio, Pierre-Alexandre Mateos and Charles Teyssou

Venue: Ellis King, Dublin, Ireland

Date: September 12 – October 17, 2015

Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Ellis King, Dublin

The exhibition System of a Down gathers together 47 artworks, by 27 artists, from different nationalities, generations and cultural backgrounds. It was mounted between the 7th and the 11th of September 2015.

The first intervention in the space involved tracing a grid which contrasts with the gallery’s architecture. The grid imagines a modernist development of Dublin based on the module of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The intersection of the grid with the gallery’s floor plan produced areas that the exhibition organizers named ‘rooms’.

At a later stage, a number of display devices were brought into the space: spotlights, scaffolding, a projection screen, monitors and projectors. The installation proceeded through conversations between the organizers in the attempt to envision meaningful clusters of artworks in each room.

Parameters such as the medium of the works, their aesthetic concerns and the socio-cultural message they convey led the decision-making process, along with the inevitable aesthetic sensibilities of each of the organisers. In this way, System of a Down presents itself as a site for compromise rather than agreement, contingency rather than speculation, disorder rather than order, subjugating the exhibition making process to the entropic forces that rule our world.