EVERYTHING, THEN, PASSES BETWEEN US
Curated by Christine Nippe
Kölnischer Kunstverein
June 27 - August 23, 2009
ARTISTS
Vito Acconci, Johanna Billing, Olga Chernysheva, Song Dong, Anja Kirschner, Klara Lidén, Improv Everywhere, Cinthia Marcelle, Marjetica Potrè, Christine Schulz, Alex Villar, and Haegue Yang
ABOUT
The exhibition Everything, then, passes between us shows snap-shots of urban life. It asks how forms of public or of temporary communities can be produced nowadays. The artists question fragmentary aspects of metropolises in times of global turmoil and ask for actual ideas of community and collectivity in the cities. The exhibition, curated by Christine Nippe together with Kathrin Jentjens and Anja Nathan-Dorn, places its focus on artistic interventions and performances in global metropolises such as Beijing, Belo Horizonte, Berlin, Cologne, London, New York and Seoul, and shows The Metropolis and Mental Life, only one hundred years after Georg Simmel's famous essay on the mentality of the inhabitants of big cities, published in 1903.
The exhibition's display and content correspond to the current state of flux and chaos. European borders are left behind, while the exhibition interconnects different places and observes global cities as laboratories of society. How space is structured, how people use it, how they move within it and how they interact are the core questions. The artists use ethnographic, mapping, and performance tactics to question the local logics. Sometimes they activate - although only for a short moment - transitory communities in public realms. For most performances interventions are used to expand reality and they often veer away from approaches from the nineties that designed alternative spaces and visions of a better future with the help of Michel Foucault's concept of "Heterotopy." The exhibition confronts the audience with situations in which the quest dominates the answers. The performances point out social gaps or possibilities for temporary "zones of contact" rather than having answers at hand. Sometimes they grow into neurotic reflections of urban emotional structures, withdraw or lapse into a farcical activism. Some artists show persistence in their quest for different "communities of conflict" that have to develop in view of an economical and ecological decay.
The selections of exhibited art works, as well as the exhibition's title, were both inspired by ideas of the British art theoretician Irit Rogoff. She talks about a collective production of meaning that nowadays takes place through "intricate webs of connectedness" or hidden forms of participation rather than through the myth of defined communities. According to Rogoff, exhibitions can be seen as a space in which political appearances or "politics without a plan" develop, enabling a performative potential if viewers develop their own focus, perspectives, and interpretations. Then, "acting without a model" takes place. We become participants of a collective turmoil reminding us of the current situation in society, where Everything, then, passes between us takes place.
Photo documentation by Simon Vogel
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