Subject:Fwd:Unknown

18.10. - 09.12.19

with
Michal Heiman, Nora Turato, Tim Etchells and Yutie Lee

Curated by
students of the Curatorial Studies (2017)

Receive, delete, forward, answer. The exhibition series Subject:Fwd:Unknown brings four artistic positions together in dialogic forms. Conversation facilitates the forming of new ideas, relationship building and conflict management. As it gradually unfolds, spontaneous reactions and unforeseen connections come to the fore: thoughts circulate or dissipate. Through dialogue creative process can kindle, just as contradiction can also arise. It is not gaining consensus that is of value, but the discussion process itself. Converse to this, societal debates are increasingly taking place via closed channels and within closed chambers. Through a lack of open discussion groups reciprocally undercut their own and others’ validity. A productive dialogue that simultaneously and self reflexively elucidates the process of its outcomes appears to find little room in public discourse. With this concern in mind, it is crucial to consider the conditions that dictate how conversations take place.

The four artists in the exhibition series each use language and communication as pivotal elements of their respective practices. How is it that a dialogue can be created without any direct encounter though? Based on a playful approach grounded by the principal of action/reaction, each artist was invited to engage as a participant in a conversation throughout the exhibition series. Several weeks prior, they sent their successor sensory impulses in the form of visual, textual or audio material via email with the intention of eliciting associations that would inspire the artistic position to follow. Through varying artistic mediums dialogic forms have materialised exploring the performative, refusal, inquisitorial and concrete. Subject:Fwd:Unknown tells a fragmented multilingual story through dialogue; at times via a collective voice and at times via incompatible parallel statements.

The point of departure for Subject:Fwd:Unknown is the exhibition #215 opening at the end of November with artists Leo Asemota and Nástio Mosquito at Portikus. The exhibition is born out of a dialogue between Asemota und Mosquito, Portikus curator Christina Lehnert, Rector of the Staedelschule Philippe Pirotte and curator Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung. The communicative practise of both artists was cultivated over a long period of time as they sent self-recorded personal monologues to each other. The dialogical process underpinning the recording and sending of the extended voice messages forms the basis of the exhibition at Portikus.

The exhibition is made possible by the "Teaching Cooperation with Non-University Partners in the City and Region" fund of the Goethe University.

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Subject:Fwd:Unknown