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Alfredo Cramerotti

Art + Tech Director, Curator, Writer, Publisher

Office address: mm:museum [Media Majlis] @ Northwestern Qatar, Education City, Doha, Qatar
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QUAD | Ha Ha Road [art management]

QUAD | Ha Ha Road [art management]

12 Aug 2011 – 23 Oct 2011
Exploring the use of humour in contemporary art, Ha Ha Road presents the work of artists who play with a 'rupture of sense'. Taking its title from the name of a street, the exhibition plays on its double meaning. Apart from its connection with laughter, a 'ha-ha' also refers to a type of sunken boundary: a wall or fence set into a trench, forming a hidden division in a landscape whilst preserving the scenic view. This invisible frontier serves as a neat metaphor for our relationship to the world of laughter. A joke transports us to a place where sense breaks down, where the familiar is turned on its head, where the ordinary becomes extraordinary, and where the world means differently. Nothing has changed and yet everything has changed. This is the paradoxical condition of humour, and the source of its disruptive power.

Details of Exhibition

The show explores what it means to step over this barrier and to set foot into the inexplicable and illogical world of humour. The artworks demonstrate how acts of absurdity, irrationality or playfulness can interrupt reality and momentarily destabilise common assumptions. They invite us to look at the world from the other side of the fence. Ha Ha Road is curated by Dave Ball and Sophie Springer and produced by QUAD in collaboration with MOSTYN.

Artists presented in the exhibition: Boris Achour (FR), Chantal Akerman (BE), Bobby Baker (UK), Dave Ball (UK), Anna + Bernhard Blume (DE), Stella Capes (UK), Yara El Sherbini (UK), Fischli + Weiss (CH), Ceal Floyer (UK), Rodney Graham (CA), Ellie Harrison (UK), Debbie Lawson (UK), Mike Marshall (UK), Kirsten Pieroth (DE), Pipilotti Rist (CH), Mathew Sawyer (UK), Ariel Schlesinger (IL), Hank Schmidt in der Beek (DE), Michael Shaw (UK), Roman Signer (CH), Charles Stankievech (CA), Annika Strom (SE), Bedwyr Williams (UK), Dan Witz (US) & Erwin Wurm (AT).

Image credit: Mathew Sawyer, NO TO BAD THINGS, 2000