In Yannic Joray’s solo exhibition, Crackpot Realism, sculpture and drawing are used to examine the subversive powers of institutions, science, and technology in historical accounts of post-war mind control operations. Through tactics like withholding, bombarding, or diverting the viewer, the artist adopts strategic moves that subtly gesture how easy it is to manipulate a willing audience. Crackpot Realism is on view through May 27, 2022 at Galerie Bernhard.
As curators, who are we and where are we going? What drives our work? What motivates our practices of curation? What role does language, literature, writing, and storytelling play? And where do our bodies come into this work—when it comes to subjective embodiment and phenomenological leanings, but also to labor, race, class? How can we consider the place of our desires and drives in contemporary curatorial practice, rooted as we both are in intersectional, anti-racist feminist frameworks, and working as white women? Here, we reflect on autotheory in terms of curatorial strategies. We reflect on our own practices as curators through the framework of autotheory, or the bridging of autobiography, embodiment, and self-reflection with theory, philosophy, and criticism: autotheory as a practice that melds the more scholarly, academic, research-based mode with autobiographical and reflective work.
When will ‹reality› stabilize again? Checking the incoming Covid-19 news, there is little doubt the virus has co-opted our daily routines for now. Here are some thoughts on dreams, consciousness, the virus.
On November 27, 2019 Geneva-based Off Space Cherish and Brand-New-Life organized a reading with Fatima Wegmann. The two contributions, titled Above the Abyssand Contradiction is Unity published here originated from this reading and are published on B-N-L as video- and text-based documentation and an accompanying essay. In her essay Fatima Wegmann is discussing the collectivizing potential of Ursula K. Le Guin’s fictional utopian horizons, intertwining performance with an interest in collaborative and healing practices. As part of an expansion of the discussion towards French-speaking Switzerland, B-N-L offers a platform to text-based artistic practice. Writing is an artistic practice that is still not comprehensively remunerated and recognized and, in the art context, is too rarely a subject of funding programmes. B-N-L therefore gives artists a framework to develop a new text.
In recent tales of science fiction, large-scale objects silently hover above cities or in earth’s orbit. There has been an increase in the representation of such objects after the 2007–08 financial crisis. This essay traces a partial history of such objects and speculates on what their representation might mean with regards to the most recent financial crisis, the international political economy (IPE) and the human psyche.
Arrival depicts the alien encounter as a transformative experience. Similar to Contact, Solaris, Encounter of the Third Kind and 2001: A Space Odyssey, the narrative is underlined by a profound, sometimes teary but never dishonest humanism. Louise Banks, played by Amy Adams, is a university linguist charged with analyzing the challenging Heptapod language. The aliens are called Heptapods because of their seven limbs.
Conceiving a thematic exhibition around a pioneering — or disastrous — moment in history has long become an accepted staple for exhibition makers seeking a reliable conceptual framework to lean on. Reconsidering this approach, the multi-faceted group show Myths of the Marble instead looks mostly to present fact and fiction.
