Road Back To Relevance

Texts by Dieter Roelstraete, Saim Demircan, Ben Gregory


Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Nomas Foundation, Rome, Road Back to Relevance gives insight into the last decade of Dan Rees’s (b. Swansea, UK, 1982) practice. It brings together groups of works—paintings, videos, installations, and photography—that have never before been viewed simultaneously, and reveals the complex nature of the artist’s research. The title refers to a slide presentation made by the artist in collaboration with an advertising strategist and designer that, by charting the course of a specific solidarity campaign between Wales and Nicaragua started in the 1980s, questions how pre-“clicktivist” modes of social engagement, activism, and international solidarity can remain relevant today. As Dieter Roelstraete writes in his essay contribution, “The work of Dan Rees touches upon a wide range of topics, subjects, and issues, but one dominant, recurring preoccupation doubtlessly concerns the politics of taste. ‘Taste’—its cultural corollaries, its political over- and undertones, and most importantly its social sources—is one of Rees’s preferred problems. And where it is addressed most directly and unapologetically—that is to say, in the so-called Artex paintings—is exactly where his work becomes most willingly, egregiously ‘problematic.’”