User:White House Biennial/sandbox

Interpretating the term “biennial” in a different, more creative way, the White House Biennial invites the participating artists to a full program of activities, the length of which is being extended within the whole duration of two years. During this period we are in the process of organizing a variety of collaborative actions and interdisciplinary events that are being presented in international exhibitions, museums, biennials and alternative spaces. WHB was founded in 2010 and is being developed in the city of Athens, where Democracy was born. At a time of deep financial and ethical crisis, amongst dozens of demonstrations and austerity protests, the WHB, poses the crucial question of the redefinition and remodelling of democratic principles. The current edition: Exercising on Democracy, seeks to explore the politics embedded in our everyday way of living, in our surrounded environment and buildings or even in the most mundane of objects and the politics of body.

Aesthetics is the human perception of beauty. By promoting artistic activism and socially engaged interventional works, the WHB seeks for artists whose ideas and approach could exercise considerable influence on the aesthetic position of the White House, the American Abbey of Democracy. Artists who could irrefutably reshape President’s perception about his office and house interior. Should we argue that certain spatial aesthetics could create crucial conditions for the decisions we take? Exceeding our mood and emotions, can they affect deeper our spirituality, consciousness, or even our ethics? Is it possible that a small household can comprise a small fortification of everyday resistance to the razing bourgeois power of the contemporary globalized civilization? Can it be the idiotype of a gym for our daily practice of those mechanisms that hold us alert? Are a subversive routine and an alternative lifestyle indispensable conditions for achieving general radicalness in social change? Is it possible that our house itself is indeed the beehive of revolt?

At our troubled times, when everyone feels the necessity to go out and shout - joining forces with the rest of the protesters in the crowded streets - the WHB gives the possibility to the participants, coming from a wide range of disciplines, to express even their very personal fears and believes, to exchange ideas and demonstrate their opinions and demands, directly from their own houses. Contemplating the virtue of silence, the WHB could be considered as the first DOMESTIC BIENNIAL, operating as an online Greek Agora that enacts from house to House dialogical platforms and networks to communicate with each other but also with the House of the American Democracy. Artists through this amazing democratic arena of building metaphors and poetics, can inspire and advocate people making decisions and hopefully politicians and the government, offering new perspectives, help them practice different behaviours with each other, or have us all experiment with how we might be a better society. An online Agora, like WHB can help pave the way to new forms of communication for the future.

The notions of house/Home and the idea that ‘revolutions’ should be initially integrated in our domestic environment, within our everyday way of living, are the fundamental topics that run the entire oeuvre of the founder and initiator of the Biennial, the artist Nicos Charalambidis. The WHB was launched in 2010 as an interactive platform in a series of cultural events, workshops, lectures and other participatory activities, organised on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the Republic of Cyprus, under the general title: Design Your House and Furniture in a way that could serve the Revolution.