The big show - globalization - Brief Article

THE BIG SHOW IS A SERIES OF EXHIBITIONS ON GLOBALIZATION. Three separate exhibitions will feature a critical platform for approaching issues of exoticism, political correctness, collective memory, alterity and utopia in a confronting way.

In order not to limit globalization to an ideology criticism of Western political and economical institutions, THE BIG SHOW chooses to approach globalization indirectly via three different views. A first way will be historical; two highly specific bodies of work on Patrice Lumumba and Albert Schweitzer will be highlighting a problematic postcolonial mentality. The second exhibition will retrace globalization to the, present as a romantic overvaluation of the local, displaying an irreparable traumatic Western memory. Part three will be utopian; concrete artist proposals will be the basis for three-dimensional architectural scale-models.

The ever more compelling confrontation with colonial history as a focal instance, but also the evolution from communism to post-communism, are triggering an exoticizing (Western) collective memory. Its means of expression are unequivocal and problematic in the desire for historical repair (as a paternalistic legacy), through the commodification of specific forms of alterity, in an "art-festival" atmosphere.

THE BIG SHOW appears at a time that is in great need of critical and innovating projects on both Western and non-Western art, their interferences, the modalities of display and discursive translation. In the cultural field in Belgium, the announced reprofiling of the Royal Museum for Central-Africa in Tervuren, and in the political field the research that is being conducted by the Lumumba-Commission are signaling a symbolical basis for change, narrowed down to historicist revisionism. On an inter- national level in the developments towards Documenta 11 among a number of initiatives, a highly speculative debate is taking form, positing alterity, inclusivity and highly romantic notions of the local as sole counternarratives for a specific model of Western exciusionism.

THE BIG SHOW is inevitably part of a climate of postcolonial and global cultural research, without fully identifying with it. The series of exhibitions that is being presented, will rather perform an in deep questioning of how the ideas of decolonization, globalization and representation (both as image production and exhibition model) can be subsumed to a broader debate.

THE BIG SHOW is curated by Wim Peeters. THE BIG SHOW is organized by the NIOC in collaboration with the Museum for African Art in New York, Jesus Fuenmayor and Julieta Gonzalez, Caracas.

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