The Phantom Moves Through Space And Through Different Bodies

23.10.2020 - 05.01.2021

Kunstverein Kevin Space, Wien / Österreich

[Die Ausstellung wurde verlängert]

The group exhibition The Phantom Moves Through Space and Through Different Bodies brings together artworks that negotiate social, psychological, and material dependencies arising from a normalized state of precarity in relation to artistic production.

The premise of this exhibition is that unstable labor relations such as job and health insecurity are no longer perceived as exceptional phenomena. Instead, the privatisation of risks and self-responsibility have been collectively accepted and today appear inevitable.... As a “discourse consolidating power among those who wield the power to alternately promise its alleviation and threaten its continuation,” precarity has become a mode of subjugation, determining the frame in which subjectivities and speech acts emerge and take form. (1) It encompasses a general condition of unpredictability taking over the individual and collective body, its affective formations and social productions of space structured along the intersections of class, gender, race and ability.

This exhibition wants to juxtapose artworks that propose possibilities of mobilizing agencies and points of address in light of complicated economic, social and psycho- logical dependencies proper specifically to the field of art and their ramifications on artistic critique. When contemporary art is involved in global processes of de- regulation and the individualization of social issues, critical negation in artistic and institutional discourse may acquire a defensive function: a way of distancing and disowning the parts of our own practices, interests and institutions we judge as bad, enabling us to persist within them. (2)

The Phantom Moves Through Space and Through Different Bodies attempts to inhabit the split resulting from our investments in these structures and complicate the dynamics that govern artistic production and reception: How, with what kind of aesthetic dispositions, spatial interventions and modes of production can uncertainty become a tool of productive interference?

Curated by Franziska Sophie Wildförster


[Quelle: https://web.archive.org/web/20210121225510/http://www.kevinspace.org/exhibitions/the-phantom-moves-through-space-and-through-different-bodies]