Artists: Mariana Castillo Deball (MX/DE), Gardar Eide Einarsson (NO/US), Rainer Ganahl
(AT/US), Carsten Höller (BE/SE), Christopher Knowles (US), Josephine Meckseper
(DE/US), Roman Ondák (SK/DE), Wilfredo Prieto (CU) and Natascha Sadr Haghighian (DE)
Curators: Latitudes (Max Andrews & Mariana Cánepa Luna) | www.lttds.org

Extraordinary Rendition* brings together the work of nine international artists in response to
notions of risk, frictionlessness and the abstraction of potentialities. It includes work in video,
sculpture, audio, painting and drawing.
Following a pre-modern discourse of danger, the emergence of risk – alongside the invention
of insurance – proposed a world governed by immaterial markets that were no longer
regulated by order, but by fundamental uncertainty, threat and insecurity. For its contextual
backdrop, the exhibition attempts to think of the present as a cultural mythology through
manifestations and elaborations of this principle. One could cite the orchestration of illusory
energy and finance markets, the manipulation of governance and property, or the clandestine
rendition of terror suspects. (Correspondingly, the Enron scandal, corruption uncovered by
operation Malaya in Marbella, or CIA stop-offs in Palma de Mallorca, for example.)
Furthermore, there are the unpredictable mega-weather events or reckless insurgencies that
are also symptomatic of an ever more stochastic and violent reality which similarly escapes an
ordinary logic of probabilities or worth. Social sensitivity to issues of security are rapidly
changing our society. Alongside this global picture, our everyday lives – especially with
respect to children – are increasingly subject to a suffocating psychology of risk aversion.
Attempts to render risk – notoriously, the US Department of Homeland Security's colour-coded
threat advisory system – are necessarily unspecific and speculative to an extraordinary
degree. In an attempt to explore this territory, the exhibition conceives of a platform that is
both purely fictional and yet perfectly real, that is completely banal while exceptional, and is
potentially valuable yet utterly worthless. Extraordinary Rendition explores multivalent
artistic modes – from the journalistic to the comical, the literal to the allusive – within a set-up
(the commercial art trade) that is, after all, itself a paradigmatic immaterial/dematerialised
market.
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* Extraordinary rendition is an American extra-judicial procedure which involves the sending of untried criminal suspects, suspected terrorists or alleged supporters of groups which the US Government considers to be terrorist organizations, to countries other than the United States for imprisonment and interrogation [Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition]