gillian holt - grey area exhibition

Grey Area examines the theme of Banality of violence, that is to say, the everyday abuse of power, in all its various forms, and the personal, political and socio-cultural consequences thereof.

This first phase of the project comprises a 14-day interdisciplinary exhibition in which through the media of video, installation and photography, nine international artists present their current insights into this theme.

Violence can take many forms, the most threatening of which are so subtle as to be almost invisible. The violence used by a fireman to break down the door of a burning building in order to save a child, or that used by a surgeon to open the chest of a heart attack victim in order to save their life, are clearly beneficial uses, but when do we cross an invisible line? When does the means no longer justify the end?

Grey Area casts a sceptical eye over some of these various forms of violence and their everyday manifestations, not in order to reach concrete conclusions of binary opposites but instead to formulate more subtle and pertinent questions.

To enquire into the workings of violence is by nature difficult, one cannot categorize it in simple terms or easily separate it from its context. There are innumerable threads that connect it to its circumstances and it is surrounded by prejudice and dogma. It may seem at first as though the answers should be obvious but upon closer examination the very term „violence“ itself dissolves into smoke before our eyes.

Many things can be seen as acts of violence. The destructive power of nature cannot easily be considered to be evil. Are normalization and globalisation abuses of power? Under which circumstances is restraint acceptable and under which not? What do we understand from “injury to meaning, content, or intent”?

According to Hannah Arendt:

“Violence can be justifiable, but it never will be legitimate ... Its justification loses in plausibility the farther its intended end recedes into the future. No one questions the use of violence in self-defence, because the danger is not only clear but also present, and the end justifying the means is immediate."

It is Essential Therefore to consider not only the causes of violence or the violent act itself but also the role that violence plays in society. Violence can be employed by; a person, a group of people or a state but wherever the desire to use violence exists, someone or something is always subjected to it. Regardless whether resisting or accepting the proposed or planned changes, those who are the target of such acts are always changed by the experience.

Hannah Arendt further remarks:

”Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance.”

Therefore violence often becomes a tool fort he initiation of a new or the maintenance of a pre-existing hierarchical system. We are often ready to accept such violence because we believe that through its employment either positive changes will occur or that negative changes can be minimised or avoided. Attempts to justify violence come most often from those who either seek either to gain a position of power or not to loose such a position that they already hold.

Grey Area intends to take a position not to seek to produce a fixed assertion as outcome but rather to attempt to consider the differences and contradictions that are contained within the subject, therefore at the end there should not be an elegant conclusion but rather a number of loose ends.