container media open call: temporary storage

The group exhibition Temporary Storage is dedicated to art that explores and thematizes the nature of duration through the very process of creating and exhibiting works. This site-specific project examines the conditions and possibilities of representation within the crypt of a Catholic church—a space where the very act of display is not normally intended. The projects presented in the exhibition make their own temporal extension, as well as the conditions and reasons for their emergence, their very content.

According to Boris Groys, the museum is a more uncompromising cemetery than the cemetery itself (Groys, “On Art Activism,” e-flux). Burial hides the body, preserving its mystery, whereas the museum presents the artwork as a final form. Media—whether objects, photographs, video, or sound—within the space of the church cease to function as means of completed representation and instead begin to operate as forms of storing time.

Christian theology promises resurrection and understands the state of death as a state of waiting. Thus, a Catholic crypt is a place of temporary rest for bodies until the resurrection of the dead. For artworks, the crypt becomes a space of rest and non-representation. This is not a refusal of display but its rethinking—display is conceived as temporary storage.