Empire of the Senseless

February 2015 through April 2015

In “Empire of the Senseless” the world is populated by new age humanoids, and punctuated by random violence; punky kids are terrorists, secret agencies viciously plot, and ethnic groups
are displaced. When reading American author Kathy Acker’s 1988 apocalyptic novel, some plots don’t seem like fiction anymore.
As with the anesthetized emotions of Acker’s new age humanoids, it seems that emotions of individuals in 2014 have equally fallen silent.

Our exposure to an endless stream of violent news has made us equally resilient to emotion.Prone to processing the world mechanically, the individual today becomes submerged in the mass. In his influential book “The Revolt of the Masses” by Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset, written in 1929, he describes the phenomena of the mass: “To be different is to be indecent. The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated.” These words find expression in our society close to a century later.

In the exhibition “Empire of the Senseless”, Friedman Benda invites five painters, all of them women, to react to the world around us and to show us their reaction to the world we live in.The works that we will compile will illustrate each artists’ quest for conceptual and empriric realitiy amidst their own unique exploration of identitiy through art.