The Absent Institution was founded by Marika and Anton Rabota in 2014 to materialize an unproductive artistic practice in the form of exhibitions, publications, projects, and events.
Anton & Marika Rabota in Seoul. 2019
Absent Institution as Artists
Besides a material activity addressed to the market and the entertainment industry, art could be assumed as the daily and invisible artist's work of recreating, recollecting, and reinventing the world and (her)himself.
Our work is indistinguishable from our daily life. It's a continuous effort, such as the daily unproductive work of a taxi driver or window washer. Our way of action means the refusal of production: if society turns art into an object of consumption, we, in response to this, act on the territory of society with an understanding of leisure as labor. MARIKA RABOTA
Absent Institution as Curators
To turn such an unproductive practice into a condition of art and make the artist with his work-in-itself visible a witness is needed. It requires the observer’s appearance, carrying out the practice of materialization, in which a hidden and aimless process renders into the matter.
Like animal species (Labridae, eel, etc), which can change sex in extreme circumstances, Marika and Anton Rabota had set up such outer observers from themselves. This alien, curatorial action combines synthetically unproductive practices with materialization, communication, and presentation.
We assume our work as the practices of resistance and overcoming; we are developing strategies of action. We are testing them in impassable circumstances of our living experience. We are accepting the universal threats and challenges with which we operate by that particular artistic means. ANTON RABOTA
The material achieved resulted from the fixation on such unproductive artwork: documentary video and photography, audio recordings, notebooks, index of things, maps, and the things themselves act as a source for materialization and re-materialization of artwork without direct production. As a result of such materialization, the artist’s unproductive practice acquires material qualities, which can be installed, stored, and transmitted at a specific moment.
Artistic practice engaged in the constant recollection of its origins, and curatorial practice following the unproductive artistic process and materializing it constitute the Absent Institution's work.