“The politics of the small gesture? Yes,I do find that a very sympathetic expression. I like the
play of opposites within it, you know, combining the concept of politics that is something of a
large-scale entity with a small gesture that is something domestic, something about our daily
realities. It is also clear that in direct comparison with big, spectacular gestures and actions, a
small event or gesture is intuitively much more interesting. For me, a big gesture has something
inherently unpleasant about it, something of an emptiness that is close to a lie.” / From Mika Hanula’s “The Politics of Small Gestures- Chances and Challenges for Contemporary Art”, published by Art-ist publications, Istanbul 2006
“The pleasure in a small gesture is how something that is in itself so little and so meaningless
can turn out to be or can become so interesting and intelligent. For me it is all about our
perception, about how we perceive things. And a small gesture, for example, is a way to change
and alter the existing reality slightly. It means visually changing the taken-for-granted
parameters of a site just a little bit.
Mika Hanula’s book represents an argumentative effort and event. It is openly against quite a lot of different attitudes, trends and tendencies that are popular and wide spread in contemporary art. It tries to close that gap between hype and the substance, between superficial interests and goods internal to a practice. It is an effort to see and articulate certain works and actions of contemporary arts as vehicles for thought. Not as products, not as spectacles, and not as authentic expressions of something called reality but as, well, something different, something else. That something is the politics of a small gesture.
It argues for a version of contemporary art that is part of our everyday experiences. It is to see art as a partner in crime. A crime of passion that is participating in the processes of shaping and making content of concepts and symbols. A web of processes that aim at generating sustainable conditions of knowledge production. It is a version of involvement in contemporary art that focuses on what it has to say to us about our lives. It is not high up there somewhere, and neither it is down anywhere. It is near, at sight, tickling our rear view. It is about meetings. Clashes and collisions. Careful caressings and wildly swinging wunderbaums.
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Organised by: [BLOK] – Lokalna baza za osvježavanje kulture in collaboration with G-MK
Micropolitics program editor:Vesna Vuković, vesna@urbanfestival.hr
*supported by: Ministry of Culture, Republic of Croatia, Zagreb City Office for Culture, Nacionalna zaklada za razvoj civilnoga društva
