Dialectics of Value

Andrea Knezović’s exhibition Dialectics of Value opens a topic connected to the relations between the production of value and the notion of shame. With the statement “Shame is a soul-eating emotion.” [The Red Book], Carl G. Jung described the term as a malignant emotion that lurks insidiously within each of us. Regardless of whether it is an intimate self-reflective view or a geopolitical or socio-cultural aspect, shame remains an omnipresent factor that serves to control, coerce and execute strictness and rigidity in communities of all sorts. Viewing shame through the paradigm of the contemporary 24/7 modes of production (Crary, 2013), Knezović studies the currency of the production of value in relation to the agencies of identity structuring in the Anthropocene age (Latour, 2013). The notion of shame can be understood as a hereditary cultural mechanism, managed by social consensus (Nussbaum, 2009), or as a dormant behavioral system that assimilates and arranges individuals within or into a collective. The artist, however, emphasizes that the concept of shame may also be viewed as a bridging tool or mediator within social transactions, and not always as a mechanism for punishment and paralysis.

With the title Dialectics of Value, the exhibition addresses value in relation to shame, exploring, through poetic manifestations and perspectives, how shame is materialised, archived, measured, what the strategies referring to it are like, and how it plays with intimate and public socio-cultural conventions. In the exhibition, three artistic installations investigate the contradictions that are created in the relations between the production of value and the anxious feeling of shame in the intimate and socio-cultural field: Memento Pudorem (Remember Shame), Lighter than Matter, Heavier than Mind and Chess of Rites.