Videostill: Arab Army, Fawzy Emrany 2007
The opp_effect is a networking work-in-progress project connecting international young artists and curators who assume that a city without art isn't imaginable.
The special thing about the opp_effect is that it will stay open to negotiation and change, will grow and will pick up (up)coming discourses which it might even create by itself. So a wandering-exhibition does. Here the non-verbal potential of art is used to connect and interact, to evoke new meaning in diverged contexts and to open up new observable or mental spaces.
Young cultural workers and initiators of art-projects will be brought together to work equal on exhibitions in the five participating countries and to explain and exchange their strategies, utopias, leeways, limits and motivation during a supporting workshop and an art-mediation program. All projects deal with their city, their surrounding and their circumstances - until now there are projects from Beirut, Vienna, Belgrade, Damascus and Halle involved– and in every city there are very different conditions existing whether economically, political, sociocultural or infrastructural.
All Projects include their very own situation into their work and force comprehension of and coping with the local realities through exhibitions and worshops in the urban space or intensive art-mediation.The motivation of every project diverges from its local realities. On the one hand space has to be made up – for contemporary art or a social discourse – like in Syria and Lebanon, on the other Hand percieved gaps are closed, like in Germany and Austria. (JK)
