Bad Joke # 1

PRESS RELEASE 26.11.2007

Bad Joke # 1
30.11.07.-06.01.08
at Tallinn Art Hall
Vabaduse square 6 

Artists: Tamy Ben-Tor (USA), Nathalie Djurberg (Sweden), Peter Finnemore (Wales), Paul Granjon (Wales), Ivars Gravlejs (Latvia), Igor Grubic (Croatia), Zlatko Kopljar (Croatia), Tsui Kuang-Yu (Taiwan), Marko Mäetamm (Estonia), Jüri Ojaver (Estonia), Julian Rosefeldt (Great Britain), Tommi Toija (Finland)

Curator: Johannes Saar 

The colonialist, patronising relationship between the great white man and the small dark-skinned aborigine is the recurrent image providing the impetus for the present post-colonial critique of racism, globalisation, social segregation and cultural ghettoisation. I would not dare to promise that “Bad Joke” in its current version at the Tallinn Art Hall and later travelling to Latvia and Croatia with a growing number of participants, weighs in with a comment on all the various clusters of problems mentioned here. But we could hope that the artists in this exhibition demonstrate some inappropriate models of behaviour that, being uneasy and odd, shed light on the strict conventions that imperceptibly control our facial expressions at funerals and exhibition openings, our notions of gender roles, expectations of electric sockets and the Orient, or that form our attitude to the talking frankfurter.

More information here