CODE SHARE takes its name from the commercial airline practice of sharing passengers, services, landing rights, and technical resources – based upon partnership agreements. Often travellers book a flight upon one airline and arrive at the gate to find that the plane and its staff is wearing the livery of a different partner airline – and serving food and drink associated with another national culture when we were looking forward to a specific set of flavours or the taste of 'home'! This might come as a pleasant surprise for the adventurous traveller but disappoint that flyer wanting to relax to familiar sounds and flavours two hours ahead of touching down.
This strategy, and reference, is especially prevalent at this moment when national carriers all over the world are facing bankruptcy or take-over. And it keys into the sense in which code sharing has evolved as a model of post-Fordist efficiency. Airlines were in the advance-guard of global corporatization and conglomeration; as companies merged, resource-sharing contracts were struck, and airport and landing licenses were purchased, so that major carriers consolidated the supply chain. Similar patterns have emerged within the circuits of contemporary art exhibition culture in which large-scale festival events – especially biennales – dominate international press coverage, and consume corporate and governmental sponsorship. A definite hierarchy of exhibitions, and exhibiting institutions, has formed in concert with these processes (in colonial and capitalist order) that are lionized by art professionals.
CODE SHARE is attempting a double-agency. It is a model of the festival exhibition: produced in dialogue with curators and artistic directors of ten biennales; and part of the national program of the "Vilnius – European Capital of Culture 2009". Yet, artists, and artworks have been selected that reflect upon the conditions of their production and processes of cultural and socio-political displacement and alienation (in the place they were made) – in denial of representativeness. The exhibition also ironizes the fact that from its position at [the] capital of culture in Europe art from Istanbul, New York, Sydney, and Taipei is presented as being peripheral.
Participating artists: Edgar Arceneaux, Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan, Nadiah Bamadhaj, Matthew Brannon, Matthew Buckingham, Yu Cheng-Ta, Harry Dodge & Stanya Kahn, Annika Eriksson, Shaun Gladwell, Wong Hoy-Cheong, Emre Huner, Jesper Just, Jane Lee, Scott Lyall, Darius Miksys, Grace Ndiritu, Sherman Ong, Kate Rohde, Raeda Saadeh, Bright Ugochukwu Eke
curated by Simon Rees
