Friendly Fire: The Audio Experience
The Station Museum of Contemporary Arts
Having hosted a wide ranging array of comprehensive exhibitions from all corners of this earthround and informed by their mission statement and commitment to free speech and freedom of expression, The activist Station Museum of Contemporary Arts has established itself as the preeminent haven in Texas for exhibiting local, national, and international artists, with an emphasis on fine arts that reflects cultural diversity and supports civil society issues by offering a forum for Texan artists to collaborate with their international equivalents.
Friendly Fire was an exhibition that anticipated the implications of the Trump-era and grouped artists together to raise questions about survival in a new dystopian post-factual era by disseminating critical thought.
Amongst others, the exhibition featured art by Forrest Prince whose contribution questioned if turning the back to society’s woes caused by the government in favour of another institution is the way to go.
Jesse Lott’s figurines raised questions about how the history of a culture shifts and changes through gentrification and how it impacts on the DNA of a place as a result to the extent that the texture of a location is affected.
Robert Hodge’s installation Few of My Favorite Things shed light on the exploitation of black angst and racism.
As with Station Museum’s previous incarnations, curation played a vital and active role in that it helped to give birth to previous unnoticed content by the way individual seemingly unrelated artworks communicated with one another, thereby creating new meaning and encouraging the public to become actively aware of the lives of others to better question our society’s morality and ethics.
The catalogue of the Friendly Fire exhibition came with a beautifully genre-bending Audio Experience vinyl record.
Curated by Robert Hodge, the record compiles the music of the exhibition centred around themes like how black civilians are handled without care and with military precision and showcasing the fact that most of the participating visual artists are also gifted musicians in their own right.
Friendly Fire adds another interesting facet to Station Museum’s diverse offerings, which includes e.g. multi-medium collaborations like the operatic film and installation that was created in collaboration with the Democracia collective to give birth to their Gesamtkunstwerk ORDER, which resulted in a tour de force response to unjust capitalism and oppression by engineering interventions in public spaces paired with the subversive disruption of the cultural grammar of opera in a bid to not merely preach to the converted to portray the omnipresent narrative of profit and exploitation in our society.
