2018 ALL Prize recipient Fikriye Oz presents her MFA thesis exhibition, Slow Death, from Tuesday, April 3 through Saturday, April 21, 2018. Oz and fellow UW-Madison MFA candidate Kaylyn Gerenz, were selected for the inaugural year of this new collaboration between ALL and the UW-Madison Art Department, which seeks to provide two outstanding graduating MFA students with an extended exhibition opportunity in the community. The artists' reception for both prizewinners will be held on Saturday, April 7, 2018, 7-9pm. Gallery hours are Tuesday-Friday, 11am-3pm and Saturday 12-5pm, and by appointment (email hello@artlitlab.org).
Exhibition Statement
“Slow death” refers to the physical wearing down of a population and the deterioration of people in that population that is very nearly a defining condition of their experience and historical existence. The general emphasis of the phrase is on the phenomenon of mass physical attenuation under global/national regimes of capitalist structural subordination and govern-mentality. It takes as its point of departure David Harvey’s polemical observation in “Spaces of hope" that under capitalism the sickness is defined as the inability to work. This powerful observation about the rationalization of health is important part of the story, but it is not the whole story either. Through the space opened up by this concept, I offer a development in the ways we conceptualize contemporary historical experience, especially when that experience simultaneously at an extreme and in zone of ordinariness. Where life building and the attrition of human life are indistinguishable and where it is hard to distinguish the modes of incoherence, distracted ness and the habituation from deliberate and the deliberative activity, as they are all involved in the reproduction of the predictable life.
Lauren Berlant: Thorough her art work, Oz analyses and describes the environments and the psyche of a civilization the is in the act of going through its own slow death. Thorough deliberate choices by placing the solitary female figure in decaying environments Oz attempts to paint the psyche of the female that is existing today.
