Sporadic Democracy

Sporadic Democracy

Sporadic Democracy is a culmination of a year-long exploration of how communities come together and fall apart, how public space is shaped, and wide-ranging experimentations with artistic forms appropriate to these questions.

Opening Reception:
Friday, September 11th 7 - 10pm

What, if anything, does an exhibition have to do with democracy?

“But does not democracy reside…in its mobility, its capacity to shift the sites and forms of participation? […]The guarantee of permanent democracy is not the filling up of all the dead times and empty spaces by the forms of participation or of counterpower; it is the continual renewal of the actors and of the forms of their actions[…]The test of democracy must be in democracy’s own image: versatile, sporadic – and founded on trust.”
Jacques Rancière, On the Shores of Politics

Politics exists in a literal landscape of streets and trees, parks and vacated lots, as well as in the speculative speech and continually reanimating acts of the populous. Democracy is also time-based, faltering and reforming. Like an exhibition, despite any attempt otherwise, it is not a stable form.

Could we posit that the unexpected emergence of an act - in this case, the act of art met with the acts of viewing and response - is a test of democracy’s image and that this image creates a residue we could call an exhibition?

Sporadic Democracy is a culmination of a year-long exploration of how communities come together and fall apart, how public space is shaped, and wide-ranging experimentations with artistic forms appropriate to these questions. Conceived as a cycle of actions, expansions and gathering points, Sporadic Democracy will contain independent, but interrelated projects within a single shared space, alternately occupying the gallery as an opening, an archive, a platform for discussion, a publication, a date, a street parade.

The exhibition includes significant contributions from The Luminary’s Fall Residents, including Tori Abernathy, Rebecca Conroy, Alessandra Saviotti, Antonio Serna, and Paul Shortt with additional contributions including a video program, entitled “Somebody Else’s Problem,” curated by Rachel Reese and an accompanying youth-led publication to be distributed throughout the exhibition.

In parallel, The Marvelous is Free, curated by Anthony Romero and Matt Joynt, opens in the entry gallery.

The Luminary's exhibitions are supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, Missouri Arts Council, the Regional Arts Commission and the Arts and Education Council. Additional support for Alessandra Saviotti's "Broadcasting the Archive" is provided by the Mondriaan Fund. Somebody Else's Problem is presented courtesy of Whitespace, Atlanta.