In this essay, Rose-Anne Gush discusses the exhibition Illiberal Lives at Ludwig Forum in Aachen, examining how unfreedom subtends art’s freedom, with attention given to its conflicted and ambivalent national impulses and representations. Her remarks center on the exhibition’s conceptualization and on specific positions within it that reveal this unfreedom in liberalism’s unfulfilled promises. The essay critically reflects on works evoking images and practices that attempt to exist beyond the capture of liberalism’s institutions.

I traveled to Amsterdam with a group of students from IZK - Institute for Contemporary Art at Graz University of Technology, my colleague Philipp Sattler and friend, curator, Andrea Popelka, to view the exhibition Charging Myths by the artist collective On-Trade-Off and other configurations of artists and scholars critically investigating the energy transition. In our case, this research relates to an exploratory tunnel, dug 1.6km into the Koralm mountain range in the Austrian Alps, where lithium spodumene was found. European Lithium, a company headquartered in Australia, plans to make this mine (among others in the region) operational by early 2025, extracting the spodumene to send it for processing in Saudi Arabia. This review essay addresses the exhibition Charging Myths and its narrative of lithium extraction in relation to the global energy transition, its histories, social and material relations, and its aesthetic and political potential.  

The «Potosí-Prinzip» was a touring exhibition project curated by Alice Creischer, Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz, and Andreas Siekmann that looked at how European Capitalism could not be thought of without the exploitation of men and nature in Latin America during Colonialism. In their show «Potosí-Prinzip-Archiv,» currently presented at Kunstraum Schwaz in Tyrol, Austria, they revisited the project and outlined blind spots and pressure points.