October 16, 2021 – January 23, 2022Artists
Daniel G. Andújar, Banu Cennetoglu, Kate Crawford / Vladan Joler, Thirza Cuthand, Anna Dasovic, Laressa Dickey, Eva Egermann, Magdalena Freudenschuss, Robert Gabris, Ali Gharavi, Niklas Goldbach, Philipp Gufler, Jan Peter Hammer, Minna Henriksson, Che-Yu Hsu, Nina Støttrup Larsen, Yunyop Lee, Alice Lex-Nerlinger, Suntag Noh, Jo Spence, P. Staff, peter steudtner, Sunaura Taylor, Romily Alice Walden, Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa, Workers' Families Seeking Justice (WFSJ) and its Support Group
Curators
Hans D. Christ, Iris Dressler, Viktor Neumann
Techniques of Becoming is the third and last part of the exhibition series Actually, the Dead Are Not Dead, which was conceived in turn as a continuation of the Bergen Assembly 2019, a triennial for contemporary art in Norway.
Following the revolt of the bodies and the political dimensions of the festival, the third part revolves on the effects and dynamics of infrastructures. The exhibition explores the institutions, networks, architectures, and logistics both of materialized and immaterial nature, with regard to their entangled relations with the prevailing neoliberal and neocolonial power structures.
In addition to the museum, the school, the clinic, or the prison— those classical institutions of biopower that philosopher Michel Foucault investigated extensively and consequently has influenced generations if thinkers and artists—the exhibition focuses on infrastructures that enable the global circulation and administration of commodities, currencies, affects, and discourses: social media, computer games, and other systems of so-called smart technologies. It probes how these institutions and systems are entangled with structural forms of sexism, racism, pathologization, violence against non-normative and more-than-human bodies, and capitalist extractivsm of recources and living beings.
The show further reflects on the historical contexts of classifying, normalizing, and excluding forms of governing, looking into their histories from the emergence of modern nation-states to the establishment of globally and digitally active economies. The invited artists counter these structures and their mechanisms of exclusion, pathologization, and oppression with aesthetic and activist practices of appropriation, empowerment, and transformation. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze described the act of becoming as a polymorphic and constant process of change and of the affirmation of difference. In this sense, the artists negotiate becoming as site of possibilities and as a technique for exercising autonomy over one’s own body, for the development of structures of mutual support and for the formation of counter-publics.
Saturday, October 30, 2021, 6 p.m.
Philipp Gufler, Quilts*
Lecture and film screenings on various queer and other protagonists from Philipp Gufler's Quilt series
Schlossplatz 2
D-70173 Stuttgart
