Actually, the Dead Are Not Dead. Techniques of Becoming

October 16, 2021 – January 23, 2022

Artists
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

Württ. Kunstverein Stuttgart

Schlossplatz 2
D-70173 Stuttgart

Kurt Raab

When the Fassbinder actor Kurt Raab recited in the TV documentary “Warten auf Sodom” from 1989 “I want to creep into the virus throat”, he turned around the positions: not the virus is the intruder anymore. Raab wanted to be the invasion on the virus.
The documentation “Warten auf Sodom” is about the last months of Kurt Raab before he died on the implications of AIDS. Signed by the side effects of AZT, the first drug against the HI-virus which was wrong dosed in the late 80s, he doesn't want to be only the victim, who is stigmatised and by that silenced. He used his publicity to embody a self-determined person with AIDS to point out the social exclusion and segregation against them and homosexuals as the other. It's not only us looking at him suffering, we and our handling with the new infection are being watched and exposed by Raab. This has a similar logic when he is the intruder of the virus, a perturbation. This was made in “Warten auf Sodom” for me most clear when Raab played his own doctor, mimic how people with AIDS are objectified: “I have to tell you something. To my opinion Mr. Raab is mentally not hundred percent sane. What is of course related to his illness, which is also attacking his brain. I have to protect the patients, just like Mr. Raab, of whom I'm thinking he is not able to decide if he wants to make a film or not.”

PG / April 2014