Wörter, Sprache, Gespräche ausstellen (Excerpt)

Aus: Stefanie Heraeus (Hg.)

Wörter, Sprache, Gespräche ausstellen Dezember 2021, 120 S., kart.

34,00 € (DE), 978-3-8376-6159-0 E-Book: PDF: 33,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-6159-4

Wie lassen sich Wörter, Sätze, Gespräche und andere sprachbasierte Kommunikationsformen ausstellen? Und wie verändern Gesprächsmodi — als Konzept, Performance, Sound oder Code, Notiz oder Aufzeichnung — das Format und den Raum der Ausstellung? Die Beiträge des Bandes widmen sich diesen Fragen und stellen dabei gegenwärtige künstlerische Positionen aus verschiedenen kulturellen Zusammenhängen ins Zentrum. Ausgangspunkt der Diskussionen sind zwei kuratorische Projekte in Frankfurt am Main: Die Ausstellung 215 mit Leo Asemota und Nástio Mosquito im Portikus und Subject:Fwd:Unknown mit Michal Heiman, Nora Turato, Tim Etchells und Yutie Lee im Projektraum fffriedrich.

Mit Beiträgen u.a. von Fiona Geuß, Heike Gfrereis, Christina Lehnert, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung und Philippe Pirotte.

Stefanie Heraeus ist Initiatorin und wissenschaftliche Leiterin des Masterstudiengangs »Curatorial Studies — Theorie — Geschichte — Kritik« der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main und der Hochschule für Bildende Künste-Städelschule.

Weitere Informationen und Bestellung unter: www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-6159-0

© 2021 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

05 EINLEITUNG: WÖRTER, SPRACHE, GESPRÄCHE AUSSTELLEN / INTRODUCTION: EXHIBITING WORDS, LANGUAGE, CONVERSING Stefanie Heraeus

12 #215: LEO ASEMOTA & NÁSTIO MOSQUITO. EINE AUSSTELLUNG ÜBER DIALOGE / AN EXHIBITION ON DIALOGUES Christina Lehnert AN INTIMATE CONVERSATION Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung / Philippe Pirotte

20 SUBJECT:FWD:UNKNOWN. EINE AUSSTELLUNGS­­REIHE ÜBER SPRACHE ALS MEDIUM UND FORM / AN EXHIBITION SERIES ON LANGUAGE AS A MEDIUM AND FORM Dennis Brzek / Sarah Heuberger / Lea Maria Steinkampf 16

24 INTERVIEW WITH TIM ETCHELLS: UNFOLDING IN TIME Dana Schütte / Leonore Spemann 30 INSTALLATIONSANSICHTEN / INSTALLATION VIEWS 44

MICHAL HEIMAN Sarah Heuberger / Ben Livne-Weitzman

48 DISZIPLINIERENDE ÄSTHETIK UND GESTE DER RÜCKKEHR / DISCIPLINING AESTHETICS AND GESTURE OF RETURN Reaktion von / Reaction by Laliv Melamed 52

NORA TURATO Sarah Crowe

55 IM RITUELLEN MODUS DES BOXKAMPFS / IN THE RITUAL MODE OF THE BOXING MATCH Reaktion von / Reaction by Vivien Trommer

58

TIM ETCHELLS Peter Hess

62

SANFTE EINLADUNG / SOFT INVITATION Reaktion von / Reaction by Yevgeniy Breyger

66

YUTIE LEE Klara Hülskamp/Junia Thiede

69 CODES UND SPRACHE / CODES AND LANGUAGE Reaktion von / Reaction by Tomke Braun 73 GESPRÄCHE AUSSTELLEN. PLATZHALTER – RELIKT – VERBINDUNGSLINIE ZWISCHEN KUNST UND GESELLSCHAFT / EXHIBITING CONVERSATION: PLACEHOLDER – RELIC – CONNECTING ART AND SOCIETY Fiona Geuß 86 WÖRTER ZEIGEN. EINE POETISCHE SICHT AUF DAS AUSSTELLEN VON LITERATUR UND PHILOSOPHIE / SHOWING WORDS. A POETIC APPROACH TO THE EXHIBITION OF LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY Heike Gfrereis 106 Biografien und Werkangaben / Biographies and Exhibited Works 111 Autor*innen / Authors 114 Literatur / Bibliography 118 Impressum

EINLEITUNG

EINLEITUNG: WÖRTER, SPRACHE, GESPRÄCHE AUSSTELLEN Stefanie Heraeus Wörter, Sätze, Sprachnachrichten, Gespräche und andere sprachbasierte Kommunikationsformen auszustellen ist das Thema des vorliegenden Bandes. Dieses Themenfeld wird aus unterschiedlichen Perspektiven beleuchtet. Im Zentrum stehen dabei gegenwärtige künstlerische Positionen aus verschiedenen kulturellen Zusammenhängen, von denen vier im Rahmen von Subject:Fwd:Unknown. Eine Ausstellungsreihe über Sprache als Medium und Form im Frankfurter Projektraum fffriedrich zu sehen waren: Michal Heiman, Nora Turato, Tim Etchells und Yutie Lee. Dabei nahmen die Wörter und das Medium Sprache höchst unterschiedliche Formen und Dynamiken im Ausstellungsraum an. Sie traten als Gespräch, Stimme, Sound auf, bildhaft, performativ oder als elektronischer Code, als private, geheime oder an eine Öffentlichkeit gerichtete Mitteilung. Jede der vier Ausstellungen eröffnete dezidiert unterschiedliche Zugänge und Funktionsweisen.

Sie changierten zwischen persönlich, einfühlend, emotional, anonym, autoritär, investigativ, waren raumgreifend oder eher poetisch und leise.

Der Künstlerin Michal Heiman dient Sprache als Mittel, um beim Publikum subjektive oder auch imaginierte Erinnerungen wachzurufen und miteinander zu teilen. Ihre auf Teilhabe und Austausch angelegte Rauminstallation initiierte persönliche Gespräche zwischen den Ausstellungsbesuchenden über Biografie und Genealogie, über reale oder fiktive Vorfahren. Dafür stattete sie den weißen Galerieraum, ein Ladenlokal in der Frankfurter Innenstadt, mit einem Arbeitstisch und Stühlen, mit Fotografien und der Requisite eines halb aufgezogenen Vorhangs aus.

Im Gegensatz dazu zielte Nora Turato nicht auf Austausch und Dialog, sondern setzte gesprochene Sprache autoritär, als blockhaften Monolog ein. Das Publikum wurde zum schweigenden Objekt der Betextung. In ihrer 20-minütigen Performance überschüttete sie die Anwesenden mit einem Wortschwall aus abgenutzten Phrasen und Redewendungen im Rapper-Jargon oder mit Werbeslogans, forciert durch eine starke Gestik, Mimik und Intonation. Manche der Phrasen und Slogans fand man auf Prints an den Wänden des reduziert gestalteten Raumes wieder, als schwarze Schriftzüge auf monochromen Farbfeldern.

Ganz anders verfuhr Tim Etchells mit gesprochenen Wörtern: In seiner Soundinstallation wisperte es aus vier Lautsprechern und je eigenen Tonspuren immerfort „Something to lose sleep over“ (Etwas, was um den Schlaf bringt). In Variationen, Wiederholungen, Überlagerungen hörte das Publikum immer wieder aufs Neue diesen Satz, geheimnisvoll, beunruhigend, nicht greifbar. Im Schaufenster des Ausstellungsraums nahmen die Wörter hingegen eine visuelle Dimension an als Schriftarbeit mit dunkelroten Buchstaben aus Pappe in zwei Reihen übereinander: Something to Lose Sleep Over und To Lose Sleep Over Something.

5

STEFANIE HERAEUS

Yutie Lee arbeitete in zwei gegensätzlich anmutenden Medien, Keramik und Video, gewissermaßen Tradition und Gegenwart des Medialen einander gegenüberstellend.

Dabei bediente sie sich aus dem Material einer spezifischen Art historischer Kommunika­ tionstechniken, nämlich konstruierter, erfundener Sprachen – der „unbekannten Sprache“ (Lingua ignota) der Äbtissin Hildegard von Bingen aus dem 12. Jahrhundert und dem Frequenzsprungverfahren zur Funkfernsteuerung, das die Schauspielerin und Erfinderin Hedy Lamarr im Zweiten Weltkrieg miterfunden hat. Als grafische Zeichen und Vorsilben tauchten typografische Sonderzeichen, Buchstaben und Symbole in den verschiedenen Medien auf.

Den vier Einzelausstellungen der gesamten Serie sind jeweils zwei Beiträge gewidmet: zunächst aus der Perspektive der beteiligten Kurator*innen, sodann – gewissermaßen als Reaktion darauf – aus der Perspektive von Besuchenden. Die Konzeption der Ausstellungsserie Subject:Fwd:Unknown, die im Herbst 2018 stattgefunden hat, erläutern Dennis Brzek, Sarah Heuberger und Lea Maria Steinkampf. Mit Tim Etchells haben Dana Schütte und Leonore Spemann ein Interview geführt, das hier publiziert ist.

Ausgangs- und zunächst auch Referenzpunkt für die konzeptuellen und kuratorischen Überlegungen von Subject:Fwd:Unknown war ein beinahe zeitgleich stattfindendes Ausstellungsprojekt: #215 mit Leo Asemota und Nástio Mosquito im Portikus in Frankfurt am Main, kuratiert von Philippe Pirotte, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung und Christina Lehnert. Beide Ausstellungen wurden parallel erarbeitet. Die Ausstellung im Portikus basierte auf digitalen Sprachnachrichten zwischen Leo Asemota und Nástio Mosquito, die sie sich im Nachgang der documenta 14 und ihrer Beteiligung am dortigen Radioprogramm Savvy Funk über einen längeren Zeitraum zugeschickt hatten.

Christina Lehnert schildert in ihrem Beitrag, wie das Ritual des Gesprächs die künstlerischen und kuratorischen Vorgehensweisen im Portikus prägte. Es waren vor allem zwei Gesprächsformate, die angolanische Erzähltradition Ulónga, bei der von persönlichen Erfahrungen des Alltags berichtet wird, und Palaver als eine Diskussionsform ohne Entscheidungsverfahren. Beide waren sowohl das Format für die Erarbeitung der Ausstellung als auch deren Thema. Der Gesprächsmodus wurde zum Ausstellungsgegenstand. Die Inhalte der Dialoge wurden in der Ausstellung nicht offengelegt, vielmehr verwiesen Utensilien wie Sitzkissen, -möbel, Teppiche und Accessoires wie Brettspiele auf soziale, situative Interaktionen des Beisammensitzens, Sprechens und Diskutierens. Darüber hinaus konnten die Besuchenden selbst Sprachnachrichten erzeugen und anderen zugänglich machen.

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung und Philippe Pirotte diskutieren in ihrem Beitrag das subversive Potenzial privater, ursprünglich nicht für ein Publikum gedachter Gespräche im Kontext zeitgenössischer globaler künstlerischer Praktiken und Ausstellungsroutinen.

Was bedeutet es, wenn der Raum einer öffentlichen Ausstellungsinstitution die persönliche Konversation zweier Künstler und deren Kommunikationsformen in den Fokus rückt?

Gesprächs­modi auszustellen, die wie in der Ausstellung im Portikus an Palaver und Ulónga anknüpfen, sind für sie nicht zuletzt Versuche, sich im gegenwärtigen postkolonialen Kontext zu bewegen und Ausstellungsinstitutionen als Orte paritätischen Austauschs zu markieren.

6

EINLEITUNG

Die sechs Künstler*innen beider Ausstellungen sind in der Publikation mit einem eigenen Beitrag vertreten. Ergänzt werden die künstlerischen Beiträge durch zwei Essays, die sich aus kunsthistorischer und aus literaturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive mit Gesprächs­ f­ormaten, Worten und Sprache beschäftigen. Fiona Geuß skizziert in „Gespräche ausstellen.

Platzhalter – Relikt – Verbindungslinie zwischen Kunst und Gesellschaft“, wie seit dem Ende der 1960er Jahre Gesprächsformate und Dialogformen zum Bestandteil künstlerischer Praktiken wurden, um – häufig im Kollektiv – gesellschaftskritische, teilweise auch aktivistische Haltungen zu formulieren. Anhand exemplarischer Positionen aus Europa und Nordamerika, beginnend mit der 1969 gegründeten Art Workers Coalition bis hin zu Arbeiten des Künstlerkollektivs Group Material aus den 1980er Jahren, erläutert sie, wie diese Einzug in den Ausstellungskontext hielten. Einzelne Exponate oder ganze Installationen, Notizzettel, Visitenkarten, beschriebene Tafeln oder andere Überbleibsel geselliger Zusammenkünfte verweisen auf stattgefundene, nicht öffentliche Gespräche oder solche, die im direkten Austausch mit dem Publikum geführt worden sind. Das Gespräch wurde so zu einem eigenen partizipativen Ausstellungsformat mit gesellschaftspolitischem Anspruch.

Heike Gfrereis argumentiert in ihrem Aufsatz „Wörter zeigen. Eine poetische Sicht auf das Ausstellen von Literatur und Philosophie“ aus der Perspektive einer Literaturwissenschaftlerin, die als Kuratorin am Deutschen Literaturarchiv Marbach arbeitet.

Ihre kuratorische Handschrift zeichnet sich durch ein Erproben verschiedener Adaptionsweisen aus, um spezifische literarische Formen und Erzählweisen im Ausstellungsraum erfahrbar zu machen. Weil das Medium Literatur zumeist ohne Schauwert, nicht zum Ausstellen konzipiert ist, fokussieren sich Literaturausstellungen auf die Person und Biografie einer Autorin oder eines Autors und arbeiten mit ausgewählten stellvertretenden Objekten: etwa mit persönlichen Relikten, mit Manuskripten, Büchern oder bibliophilen Ausgaben, selten hingegen mit den Wörtern selbst. Gfrereis geht es darum, die spezifischen Eigenschaften von Wörtern zu nutzen. Anhand der Gegenüberstellung zweier Textsorten, einer Szene aus Goethes Wilhelm Meister und Heinrich von Kleists Erzählung Über das Marionettentheater, erläutert sie, wie sich Wörter im Ausstellungsraum durch Bild- und Raumerfindungen so inszenieren lassen, dass sie körperlich wahrgenommen werden können.

Mein besonderer Dank gilt Christina Lehnert, die das kuratorische Projekt gemeinsam mit mir über ein Semester lang begleitet hat. Mit Philippe Pirotte und Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, der eine Gastprofessur an der Städelschule hatte, haben wir das Konzept eingehend diskutiert. Leo Asemota und Nástio Mosquito erläuterten in einem Workshop ihre Überlegungen zu ihrer Ausstellung im Portikus. Michal Heiman konnten wir für eine Lecture und Tim Etchells für ein Künstlergespräch gewinnen.

Fiona Geuß hat uns im Seminar mit Formen des Gesprächs in künstlerischen Praktiken der 1970er Jahre vertraut gemacht, Heike Gfrereis hat uns ihre kuratorischen Ansätze im Rahmen eines Studientags zum spezifischen Potenzial von Archivmaterialien im Ausstellungskontext vorgestellt. Laliv Melamed, Vivien Trommer, Yevgeniy Breyger

7

STEFANIE HERAEUS

und Tomke Braun haben sich die Zeit genommen, die Ausstellungen zu kommentieren.

Als es schließlich um die Realisierung der Publikation ging, waren es neben dem Redaktionsteam vor allem drei Personen, die hier eigens hervorgehoben werden sollen: Dennis Brzek, Sarah Heuberger und Ben Livne-Weitzman. Eike Walkenhorst hat die Ausstellungen fotografisch dokumentiert. Wanda Löwe hat die Texte äußerst sorgfältig redigiert. Ihnen allen gilt unser herzlicher Dank – und ganz besonders: den beteiligten Künstlerinnen und Künstlern.

8

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION: EXHIBITING WORDS, LANGUAGE, CONVERSING Stefanie Heraeus The subject of this volume is exhibiting words, sentences, voice messages, conversations and other language-based forms of communication, which are examined from different perspectives. The focus is on contemporary artistic positions from different cultural contexts, four of which – Michal Heiman, Nora Turato, Tim Etchells and Yutie Lee – were presented in the context of Subject:Fwd:Unknown. An exhibition series on language as a medium and form at the Frankfurt project space fffriedrich. In the series, words and the medium of language took on highly diverse forms and dynamics in the exhibition space. They appeared as conversation, voice, sound, figuratively, performatively, or as electronic code, as private, secret, or as public communication. Each of the four exhibitions opened up decidedly different approaches and modes of operation. They fluctuated between personal, empathetic, emotional, anonymous, authoritarian, investigative, between expansive or more poetic and quiet.

For artist Michal Heiman, language serves as a means to evoke and share subjective or even imagined memories with the audience. Her spatial installation, designed for participation and interaction, sparked personal conversations about biography and genealogy, about real or fictitious ancestors among the exhibition’s visitors. To this end, she furnished the white gallery space, a storefront in downtown Frankfurt, with props: a worktable and chairs, photographs and a half-drawn curtain.

In contrast, Nora Turato did not aim at exchange and dialogue, instead she used spoken language authoritatively, as a block-like monologue. The audience became the silent object of the text. Her 20-minute performance showered the audience with a torrent of worn-out phrases and idioms in rapper jargon or advertising slogans, intensified by strong gestures, facial expressions and intonation. Some of the phrases and slogans also appeared on prints hung on the walls of the pared-down room, as black lettering on monochrome color fields.

Tim Etchells took a completely different approach to spoken words: His sound installation “Something to lose sleep over” continuously whispered this phrase from four speakers, each with its own sound track. Visitors heard this mysterious, unsettling and intangible phrase over and over again in variations, repetitions and superimposed over itself. In the showroom window, the words took on a visual dimension as a script with dark red cardboard letters in two rows: Something to Lose Sleep Over and To Lose Sleep Over Something.

Yutie Lee juxtaposed tradition and the medial present to a certain extent in two seemingly contradictory media: ceramics and video. She drew on material from a specific kind of historical communication technique: constructed, invented languages – the “unknown language” (Lingua ignota) of the 12th-century abbess and saint Hildegard of

9

STEFANIE HERAEUS

Bingen and the frequency hopping method that the actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr co-invented during World War II. Special typographic characters, letters and symbols appeared as graphic signs and prefixes in the various media.

This volume addresses each of the series’ four individual exhibitions in two essays: first from the perspective of the curators involved, then – as a kind of reaction to them – from the visitors’ perspective. Dennis Brzek, Sarah Heuberger and Lea Maria Steinkampf explain the concept of the exhibition series Subject:Fwd:Unknown, which took place in the fall of 2018. Dana Schütte and Leonore Spemann made an interview with Tim Etchells, which is published here.

The starting and initial reference point for the conceptual and curatorial considerations of Subject:Fwd:Unknown was a nearly concurrent exhibition project: #215 with Leo Asemota and Nástio Mosquito at Portikus in Frankfurt am Main, curated by Philippe Pirotte, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Christina Lehnert. Both exhibitions were developed in parallel. The exhibition at Portikus was based on digital voice messages between Leo Asemota and Nástio Mosquito, which they exchanged over a longer period of time following documenta 14 and their participation in the radio program Savvy Funk there.

In her article, Christina Lehnert describes how the ritual of conversation shaped the artistic and curatorial approaches at Portikus. There were two formats of conversation in particular: the Angolan narrative tradition Ulónga, which recounts personal experiences of everyday life, and Palaver, a culture specific format of discussion without a decisionmaking process. Both were simultaneously the format for developing the exhibition as well as its subject, making the mode of conversation the object of the exhibition. The exhibition did not reveal the dialogues’ content; rather, furnishings such as seat cushions, furniture, rugs and accessories, such as board games, alluded to social, situational interactions of sitting together, talking and engaging in discussion. In addition, visitors were able to generate their own voice messages and share them with others.

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Philippe Pirotte discuss in their contribution the subversive potential of private conversations, originally intended for no audience, in the context of contemporary global artistic practices and exhibition routines. What does it mean when a public exhibition space focuses on two artists’ personal conversation and their modes of communication? For them, exhibiting modes of conversation that tie in with Palaver and Ulónga, as in the exhibition at Portikus, are attempts to move in the contemporary postcolonial context and to mark exhibition institutions as places of parity of exchange.

The six artists from both exhibitions contributed to this publication. These artistic contributions are complemented by two essays that deal with conversational formats, words and language from the art history and literary studies perspectives.

In “Exhibiting Conversations. Placeholder – Relic – Line of Connection between Art and Society”, Fiona Geuß outlines how, since the end of the 1960s, conversational formats and forms of dialogue have become an integral part of artistic practices in order to formulate – often collectively – sociocritical, sometimes activist attitudes. Using exemplary

10

INTRODUCTION

positions from Europe and North America, beginning with the Art Workers Coalition founded in 1969 to works by the artist collective Group Material from the 1980s, she explains how these found their way into the exhibition context. Individual pieces or entire installations, notes, business cards, written boards or other remnants of social gatherings reference conversations that have taken place, not in public, or those that were conducted in direct exchange with the audience. The conversation became its own participatory exhibition format with socio-political aspirations.

In her essay “Showing Words. A Poetic View on Exhibiting Literature and Philosophy”, Heike Gfrereis argues from the perspective of a literary scholar who works as a curator at Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach. Her curatorial signature is characterized by experimentation with different modes of adaptation that make specific literary forms and narratives tangible in the exhibition space. As the medium of literature is mostly without show value, or not designed to be exhibited, literary exhibitions focus on the person and biography of an author and work with selected representative objects: for example, with personal relics, manuscripts, books or bibliophilic editions, but rarely with the words themselves. Gfrereis is interested in using the specific properties of words. By juxtaposing two types of writing, a scene from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister and Heinrich von Kleist’s story Über das Marionettentheater, she explains how words can be staged in the exhibition space by inventing images and spaces in such a way that they can be physically perceived.

I would like to give special thanks to Christina Lehnert, who accompanied the curatorial project together with me for one semester. We discussed the concept extensively with Philippe Pirotte and Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, who held a visiting professorship at the Städelschule. Leo Asemota and Nástio Mosquito held a workshop, in which they explained their thoughts on their exhibition at Portikus. We were fortunate to have Michal Heiman give a lecture and Tim Etchells participate in an artist talk. Fiona Geuß introduced us to forms of conversation in artistic practices of the 1970s in a seminar, and Heike Gfrereis presented her curatorial approaches on the specific potential of archival materials in the exhibition context in the context of a study day. Laliv Melamed, Vivien Trommer, Yevgeniy Breyger and Tomke Braun took the time to comment on the exhibitions for this volume.

Finally, in addition to the editorial team, three people deserve special mention for their efforts in making this publication a reality: Dennis Brzek, Sarah Heuberger and Ben Livne-Weitzman. Eike Walkenhorst documented the exhibitions photographically.

Wanda Löwe edited the texts with great care. Our heartfelt thanks go to all of them – and especially to the participating artists.

11

CHRISTINA LEHNERT

#215: LEO ASEMOTA & NÁSTIO MOSQUITO. EINE AUSSTELLUNG ÜBER DIALOGE Christina Lehnert Das erste Treffen der Künstler Leo Asemota und Nástio Mosquito1 und der Kurator*innen Philippe Pirotte, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung und Christina Lehnert begann im Frühjahr 2018 mit einem Ulónga.2 Dabei handelt es sich um eine angolanische Tradition: Wenn man sich trifft, erzählt man sich, was man vom Zeitpunkt des letzten Treffens bis zum Zeitpunkt des gegenwärtigen Treffens erlebt, gedacht, gefühlt hat. Dieses Format des gemeinschaftlichen Sprechens gehört in eine Reihe von Kulturtechniken des Gesprächs wie das Palaver: Ursprünglich bezeichnet Palaver einen Rat, der Entscheidungen durch Gespräche erst dann fällt, wenn ein Übereinkommen erzielt wurde. Entscheidungen werden nicht aufgrund vorgefertigter, abstrakter Regeln getroffen, sondern innerhalb eines Gesprächsverlaufs entwickelt.

Asemota wurde zum ersten Ulónga per Skype aus London nach Frankfurt zugeschaltet, was eine die Ausstellung mitbestimmende Dimension verdeutlicht: Politik, die den Einzelnen in seiner Freiheit und Bewegung betrifft, genauso wie die Einfachheit des Reisens von Berlin oder Lissabon nach Frankfurt.

Die Idee zur Ausstellung #215 basiert auf einem privaten Austausch von Sprachaufnahmen, die Asemota und Mosquito einander seit ihrem Zusammentreffen anlässlich des documenta-14-Radios Savvy Funk gesandt haben. Sprachnachrichten erzeugen einen zeitlich versetzten Dialog, der eine alternative Unterhaltung ermöglicht und Zeit für eine Reaktion lässt. Daher charakterisieren Gesprächsformen wie Dialog oder Monolog und Interaktion auch ihre Kollaboration in der Ausstellung #215.

Als Institution und damit als öffentlicher Raum wurde der Portikus durch #215 zu einem Ort, an dem Begegnung und Privatheit, Manifestationen und Gedanken koexistierten.

Die Werke sind für die Ausstellung entstanden und beziehen sich auf die architektonischen, funktionalen und geografischen Eigenheiten des Portikus. Sie verändern den Modus des Ausstellungsbesuchs und die Bewegung durch den Raum: Statt einer Präsentation von Arbeiten wird die Ausstellung zu einem Aufenthalts- und Kommunikationsort.

Zentral im Raum befand sich Recording Booth for „These“, ein Aufnahmestudio in der Form der Architektur des Portikus. Hier konnten die Besucher*innen, ähnlich wie die beiden Künstler, Nachrichten aufnehmen, die sie an Personen ihrer Wahl richteten.

Dafür wurde ein Verschlüsselungscode generiert, der an die Empfänger*innen weitergereicht werden konnte (als Postkarte, durch die Ausstellungsaufsichten oder als Foto), sodass diese die Nachricht durch Eingabe des Codes im Portikus nachhören konnten.

Kommunikation als Motiv fand sich in verschiedenen Formen und Transformationen wieder: Die privaten Gespräche zwischen Asemota und Mosquito wurden nicht offengelegt, fanden sich jedoch als Mitschriften beider Künstler im Ausstellungsraum wieder.

12

#215: LEO ASEMOTA & NÁSTIO MOSQUITO

Notizen auf Glas und Notizen auf Kohlepapier erzählten von dem Dialog – quasi aus zweiter Hand. Nástio’s words, some are mine enthielt alle Notizen Asemotas, die er zu den Gesprächen gemacht hatte, so dicht zusammengeschrieben auf einem Papier, dass Chronologie und Lesbarkeit verloren gehen und eher als Verunschriftlichung wie eine Partitur der Aufnahmen Mosquitos bzw. der Gedanken Asemotas erschienen.

In die Planung der Ausstellung wurden Kollaborateure eingebunden: Schreiner*innen, Grafiker*innen, Mediengestalter*innen und Architekt*innen bildeten das Studio #215 und erweiterten damit den Kreis außerhalb des festgelegten Teams. Für die Zeit der Installation wurde der Portikus so zu einer Art Workshop, der bereits im Vorfeld durch gemeinsames Erarbeiten im Hinblick auf die Fähigkeiten aller Beteiligten die Entstehung der Ausstellung ermöglichte.

Auch in anderer Weise wurden Elemente aus den Herkunftskulturen der Künstler aufgegriffen. Die im Raum angebotenen Sitzgelegenheiten, sogenannte Agba Stools, sind traditionell zeremonielle Stühle aus Benin. Ihre Geschichte und Herstellung zeugt von mehreren kulturellen Einflüssen. So ist die Verbindung der Einzelteile nicht nigerianischer, sondern europäischer Herkunft (mortise and tenon, zu Dt. Verzapfung).

Für die Ausstellung wurden die Stühle in vereinfachter Form von Studierenden und Mitarbeiter*innen der Städelschule in verschiedenen Hölzern nachgebaut. Sie dienten als Tische oder Hocker für Besucher*innen und Werke in der Installation.

Die Ausstellung nahm immer wieder Bezug auf den Portikus und seine Strukturen: Die von Asemota entworfenen Letterpress-Drucke wurden als Editionen verkauft und sollten für die Reparatur der Letterpress Druckmaschine der Städelschule verwendet werden. Ausstellungskataloge aus dem Lager des Portikus dienten als Sockel für die Notizen Mosquitos. „To take what’s there“ als Ausgangsprinzip zu benutzen war eine Geste, die es den Künstlern an einer öffentlichen Institution ermöglichte, einen Ort zu schaffen, der nichts erzwang. So schöpfte die Ausstellung ihre Möglichkeiten durch Kollaborationen in und mit den vorhandenen Strukturen aus und verwandelte den vorgefundenen institutionellen Rahmen durch die eigenen künstlerischen Praktiken.

Die Gespräche zwischen den Künstlern waren der Anstoß für weitere Dialoge, in der nicht der Einzelne, sondern das Wissen vieler zu Bausteinen der Ausstellung geworden sind.

1 2

Leo Asemota wurde in Benin City, Nigeria, geboren. Er lebt in London und an seinem Geburtsort Benin-City. Nástio Mosquito wurde in Angola geboren und pendelt zwischen Lissabon und Gent. #215 war die erste gemeinsame Ausstellung der beiden Künstler.

Publiziert als: Lehnert et al. 2018.

13

CHRISTINA LEHNERT

#215: LEO ASEMOTA & NÁSTIO MOSQUITO. AN EXHIBITION ON DIALOGUES Christina Lehnert The first meeting between the curators Philippe Pirotte, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Christina Lehnert, and the artists Leo Asemota and Nástio Mosquito1 in spring 2018 began with an Ulónga, an Angolan tradition in which one generally recounts what one has experienced, thought and felt since the last meeting.2 The format of communal speech is part of a series of cultural conversation techniques, such as the Palaver, which, apart from its everyday meaning, dates back to a form of assembly in which decisions are first made after conversation leads to consensus. Here, decisions are not the product of pre-established abstract rules, but develop over the course of a conversation instead.

The fact that Asemota could only be streamed in to the first Ulónga in Frankfurt via Skype reveals a dimension that also defined the exhibition: politics that affect individual freedoms, including movement and the convenience of traveling from Berlin or Lisbon to Frankfurt.

The idea for #215 came from a private exchange of voice recordings between both artists, which they have been sending each other since meeting on the occasion of Savvy Funk, the radio program at documenta 14. The voice messages produce a temporally displaced dialogue, which enabled a different kind of conversation. Conversation forms like the dialogue and monologue as well as interaction thus came to characterize the form of their collaboration in the exhibition #215.

As an institution and public space, the works and installations transform the Portikus into a site where encounters, privacy, manifestation and thought all coexist. Both artists developed their works specifically for the exhibition and draw on the architectural, functional, geographical and atmospheric particularities of the space. They change the manner of how the exhibition is visited and how visitors move through it: instead of merely presenting work, the exhibition becomes a place to linger and communicate.

In the center of the room was the Recording Booth for “These”, a recording studio in the form of the Portikus’ architecture. Here, visitors could record messages that they addressed to people of their choosing, similar to the two artists. The booth generated an encryption code to pass on to the recipient (as a postcard, by the exhibition guards, or as a photograph), so that they could listen to the message by entering the code in Portikus.

Communication as a motif was found in various forms and transformations: the exhibition did not divulge the private conversations between Asemota and Mosquito; they were reflected in the space as transcripts by both artists, however. Notes on glass and notes on carbon paper told of the dialogue – second-hand, as it were. Nástio’s words, some are mine contained all of Asemota’s notes that he had taken on the conver-

14

#215: LEO ASEMOTA & NÁSTIO MOSQUITO

sations, written densely on a single sheet of paper so illegibly that the chronology is impossible to follow; it appeared to be more of an anti-transcription, like a score of Mosquito’s recordings or Asemota’s thoughts.

The collaborators, carpenters, designers and architects were all involved in planning the exhibition and expanded the design of #215 and its sphere beyond the institute through their means. For the duration of the installation, Portikus became a virtual workshop that enabled all of those involved to create the exhibition in advance by working together and using their skills.

Elements from the artists’ cultures of origin were also incorporated in other ways.

The seating offered in the room, Agba Stools, are traditional ceremonial chairs from Benin. Their history and manufacture attest to several cultural influences. The individual parts, for example, are joined by methods not of Nigerian but of European origin (mortise and tenon). For the exhibition, Städelschule students and staff reproduced a simplified form of the chairs in various types of wood. They served as tables or stools for visitors and works in the installation.

The exhibition repeatedly drew on Portikus and its structures: the letterpress prints designed by Asemota were sold as special editions and the proceeds from the sales were to be used for the repair of the Städelschule’s letterpress printing machine. Exhibition catalogs from the Portikus warehouse served as bases for Mosquito’s notes.

“Taking what’s there” as a starting principle was a gesture that allowed artists at a public institution to create a place that didn’t force anything. The exhibition exhausted its possibilities through collaborations in and with the existing structures, transforming the existing institutional framework through the artists’ own practices.

The conversations between the artists were the impetus for further dialogues, in which not the individual but the knowledge of many became the building blocks of the exhibition.

1 2

Leo Asemota was born in Benin City in Nigeria. He has places of residence in London, England, and in his city of birth. Nástio Mosquito was born in Angola and lives between Lisbon and Ghent. #215 is the first exhibition that both artists have worked on together.

Published as: Lehnert et al. 2018.

15

BONAVENTURE SOH BEJENG NDIKUNG / PHILIPPE PIROTTE

AN INTIMATE CONVERSATION Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung / Philippe Pirotte Philippe Pirotte [PP]: I think that today there is a crisis in the idea of conversing.

That is maybe the reason why we chose to help create that intimacy between artists Leo Asemota and Nástio Mosquito, as part of their exhibition at Portikus. A question is: how to find that intimacy again? Paradoxically, tackling that question could produce the most politically-relevant text today. All the rest seems too much a sprawling out of opinions.

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung [BSBN]: Achille Mbembe once said in a lecture in Johannesburg that opinion is not knowledge. Everybody claims to have an opinion.

This is not knowledge. So how do we create those spaces, where you get initiated and you get the knowledge? Where you are of-the-knowing? Leo and Nástio were in a deep conversation that we knew we were interested in, but we could not get into. They were really indulged in it. The question was – how do you present this in an exhibition context?

How do you exhibit this conversation without revealing or betraying too much? We engaged in conversations with them, which we also published, but to me, it was a question of – if you have to give out something, what do you give? Even the notion of the carbon copy is twisted. Carbon copy works by placing a carbon paper between two papers, which then transfers the writing from the first to the second paper through the carbon.

Then you have a print of what you’ve written. But if you reveal that carbon paper as the piece itself, as the level of communication, then you are concealing as you are revealing.

To think with Homi Bhabha’s Location of Culture (1994), this is this space of in-betweenness.

The carbon paper is that in-betweenness, it is how you exist in that in-between space as the beyond or the post. This is what interested me in this exhibition and also in general – in my curatorial practice at large. Interestingly, in relation to institutional critique, I think Leo and Nástio are doing some form of institutional critique, just not an up-inyour-face one.

PP: It didn’t become institutional critique in the end, because the premise was sympathetic to the institution. What interested me is that we live in times where everything is made public, and how can we, with Portikus as a public institution, do something paradoxical.

There was a public aspect to the project, and even a very generous public aspect, but that what the exhibition really was about was kept private, to a big extent. This paradox interested me – how can a public art institution, not a private one, encourage two minds to have a conversation amongst themselves? To continue it, perhaps with more pressure, and in the end not to make it public, because this would destroy that conversation. Already before this project with Leo and Nástio, when it comes to the discourse and theories around institutional critique, I was always interested in the possibility of the critique of the public, which is never made. The public is an institution. It is a kind

16

AN INTIMATE CONVERSATION

of taboo to assume that, certainly in contemporary cultural politics, the contexts of cultural funding, with ideas about the distribution of knowledge, etc. But I am convinced today there is a big need to go underground with knowledge. Not to be obscurantist, but to protect certain knowledges against exploitation.

BSBN: Exactly. And in the exhibition, it was in the changing of the opening hours, the shift from the standard times to ‘sunrise-to-sunset’. It is very subtle but subversive.

It’s underground, in a very gentle way, but it’s there.

PP: Perhaps Leo’s most aggressive, but at the same time gentle intervention, was the Eclipse, by turning off Olafur Eliasson’s light installation at the attic. It installs a notion of darkness, a darkness suffused with content. It could even, if you go further, be an allegory, a critique on enlightenment, consciously or unconsciously. Leo brought in darkness by just turning off some lights.

BSBN: Yes, this is it. That which is not obvious, that which is not seen primarily. That’s what they did.

PP: This project was also a soul-searching for the curator. Curators are often expected to fulfil the role of public intellectuals. We might be intellectuals, and we might have a public role, but fully adopting the role of a public intellectual is almost preposterous.

When you mentioned the notion of political speech, the context is so complex, that those opinions are often not much more than sound-bites. That is where the crisis lays.

Each political issue today is so complex that it’s very difficult to have a short-range answer to it. You need to take a lot of things into account. That provokes the inflationist series of curatorial concepts. And it is one of the things which had been demanded from curatorial studies and curatorial education – the production of public intellectuals discussing in a delegated realm. The cliché today is to talk about notions of post-truth and fake news, but it is the uttering of opinions that also allowed for that to happen.

There is very little time given for a complex consideration of a certain problem. The expectation is for a brief, fast, short answer. The same is being asked from art exhibitions – the moment they are more complex, or that the experience in them and their approach becomes ‘work’ for the audience, they are often dismissed by a big part of the most vocal public realm. I remember when I was 16, I was living in Antwerp and we traveled to Cologne by car. There were no cheap flights yet and all that, so you couldn’t travel far. We went to see the exhibitions there, and what was cool at that time was to see things you wouldn’t understand. It was a very different kind of experience, but a desired one.

Looking forward to experience things you wouldn’t understand immediately. That was the pleasure of it. Today, there is an ideology, and often a critical stance towards the art world and art manifestations, which are occupying much more the center of public attention than 30 years ago, but at the same time there is an enormous demand for transparency, a refusal of the positive aspects of opacity, of thickness. I think that is

17

BONAVENTURE SOH BEJENG NDIKUNG / PHILIPPE PIROTTE

symptomatic for a bigger phenomenon, a crisis of our times. This is also something we were indirectly thinking about when we were doing this project at Portikus.

BSBN: I want to pick up on the point of certainty and uncertainty. A place for more uncertainty. One notices that today people come more with ready-made opinions and are less ready to find a middle ground – ‘I already know where you’re coming from, therefore I know who you are, I am certain about that’. Which is, of course, just not true.

An American comedian once said that the worst place for a black man to accomodate is in the mind of a white man. When they see you they don’t really see you, they see some impression of you. I think that is the issue for which conversation becomes extremely important. Conversations as spaces of negotiations. In those spaces where you talk, you negotiate and you find a way, via talking to each other. Coming back to Homi Bhabha, if you stand on your ground – you have your own opinion, you cannot move away.

Then, this space of in-betweenness does not exist. If you hear Trump saying ‘I want a wall!

Whatever you guys think, I want a wall,’ and then the others say ‘We don’t want a wall, we want border security’ – they are speaking but they are not conversing. They do not find common denominators or even look for them. We experience similar issues daily, even with our partners at home. You talk to each other but you don’t converse. The etymology of converse is situated in keeping company with, living among or being familiar with. We bypass each other in this speaking. Leo and Nástio try to find a way to think about what it means to converse. So how can exhibition-making be connected to these processes of intimate conversation?

PP: Curatorial practice should change all the time. What would be radical curating today? It depends from which perspective you come to curate. With what baggage you’re doing it. Meaning – as critical as I might be about it, at the same time I am also intrigued by this notion of the curator as a public intellectual. I was raised in a time where the curator was more of a craftsman and a connoisseur. The latter I kind of dismissed, but I embraced the idea of the craftsman. The moment curatorial education came about, the craftsman idea was abandoned. It was a deskilling of a craft, while at the same time embracing a more discursive approach, trying to build up the discourse of curating, which is also relatively recent. This became the initial focus of curatorial education – to create a discourse while relegating the craftsmanship to others.

BSBN: For me, I have been interested in exhibition-making and curatorial practice as a kind of jam session. As if it is 2 a.m. in a jazz club somewhere and people just flow in.

Each comes with their own baggage; some know each other, some are in conversation with each other – but at that moment of exposure, they present to you something you do not know. It is really about the conversation. First it’s about them listening to each other. Then they listen to you and you to them. The jammers are in a conversation, in public. It doesn’t tell you anything about what they do when they practice, when they sit at home or play with their band. In the jam session, they come and play something

18

AN INTIMATE CONVERSATION

unpredictable. It is a certain degree of revelation to the audience, which is not an invited audience, but one which happened to stumble upon the open door. I am interested in this space also in relation to the notion of darkness. Not the overexposed spaces of light, of over- and hyper-visibility. But rather spaces of darkness. What kind of conversations happen there. This is what fascinates me as a curator.

PP: One of the issues I am facing at the moment is: what do I do as a white European male curator? What kind of solidarities can I genuinely engage in? It is a very tricky question. One of the things I am happy to have done is to work more for other people.

This is what I tend to do now. I worked for Melati Suryodarmo at the Jakarta Biennale.

It tries to answer the question of what to do now. How to engage with questions, discourses, where we, as European men, become the people accountable, not those who ask the first question. The attempt is to find a way out of the specific debate, such as on restitution or specific perspectives, and try to find a broader theoretical framework, one which does not yet exist. I found hints in the writings of Jean Genet, who without using the word, thought about decolonizing language, to exorcise it of its Western male entitlement.

There is a lot of readiness to jump on the bandwagon of decolonization, but I think the core is a very difficult one – how to think and deconstruct notions of entitlement, without adopting the excuse of guilt, because that would be another iteration of the entitlement of the self.

BSBN: This is definitely true, we have to open up. Thinking of SAVVY for example, what we have been trying to do for the past ten years is to create spaces for multiple epistemologies. Multiple ways of being-in-the-world. Multiple bodies existing in certain and varying spaces. How could a curatorial practice engage with that? In embracing differences. Edouard Glissant wrote in Poetics of Relation that relations are only possible due to differences. Not big differences, but a lot of small differences. How could a curatorial practice become a practice of relation-making around differences? Maybe we should shift from curating as a static notion to ‘curatoriality’, a process that is continuously changing, that adopts to time, space, peoples, cultures. Curatorial practice as a jam session – with its possibilities for engaging and negotiating.

19

DENNIS BRZEK / SARAH HEUBERGER / LEA MARIA STEINKAMPF

SUBJECT:FWD:UNKNOWN. EINE AUSSTELLUNGSREIHE ÜBER SPRACHE ALS MEDIUM UND FORM Dennis Brzek / Sarah Heuberger / Lea Maria Steinkampf Weiterleiten, empfangen, vergessen, löschen, antworten. Die Ausstellungsreihe Subject:Fwd:Unknown unternimmt den Versuch, unterschiedliche Stimmen im Gespräch zusammenzubringen. Neue Ideen entwickeln, Beziehungen zueinander bilden und Konflikte bewältigen – all diese Techniken menschlichen Handelns werden nur durch das Gespräch möglich. Die Offenheit im Moment der sprachlichen Kommunikation zwischen zwei oder mehr Personen ist grundlegend für ein Zusammenleben, das vom Miteinander profitiert. In einem Gespräch wird spontanen Reaktionen, überraschenden Ideen und ungeahnten Verknüpfungen Raum gegeben – Gedanken zirkulieren oder verflüchtigen sich wieder. Gesellschaftliche Debatten und politische Diskussionen finden inzwischen jedoch zunehmend in geschlossenen Räumen statt, in denen Meinungen homogen und ohne Widerspruch auftreten. Demgegenüber eignet sich eine offene Gesprächsstruktur dafür, sowohl kreative Prozesse anzustoßen als auch entgegengesetzte Standpunkte in Austausch miteinander treten zu lassen. Insofern macht nicht ein erzielter Konsens den Wert eines Gesprächs aus, sondern der Aushandlungsprozess selbst und die eigene Positionierung. Das produktive Gespräch, das zugleich seine Bedingungen reflektiert, scheint im öffentlichen Diskurs aber immer weniger Raum zu finden. Umso wichtiger ist es, Gesprächssituationen in den Blick zu nehmen, die Bedingungen für das Miteinander-Sprechen schaffen.

Für den Zeitraum vom 18. Oktober bis zum 9. Dezember 2018 waren vier Künstler*innen eingeladen, aufeinanderfolgend Projekte im Ausstellungsraum fffriedrich in Frankfurt am Main zu realisieren. Das künstlerische Arbeiten von Michal Heiman, Nora Turato, Tim Etchells und Yutie Lee eint, dass Sprache und Kommunikation ein grundlegendes Moment ihrer Praxis bilden. Auf der Grundlage einer spielerischen Methode, die auf dem Prinzip Aktion und Reaktion beruht, wurden die vier Künstler*innen gebeten, in ein Gespräch einzutreten. Über einen Zeitraum von sechs Wochen sandten sie der folgenden Künstlerin oder dem folgenden Künstler sensorische Impulse – Bildmaterial, Texte oder Audiomaterial – per E-Mail zu. Dadurch ausgelöste Assoziationen beeinflussten die jeweils folgende künstlerische Produktion und gaben Anlass für interne Aushandlungsprozesse und externe Verbindungen, die innerhalb der Ausstellungsreihe mehr oder weniger sichtbar waren.

Den Ausgangspunkt der Auseinandersetzung mit Mechanismen von Sprache, Kommunikationsformen und Gesprächsbedingungen bildete die Ausstellung #215 der Künstler Leo Asemota und Nástio Mosquito, die vom 1. Dezember 2018 bis zum 27. Januar 2019 im Portikus stattfand. Die dialogische Praxis der beiden Künstler wurde um Gespräche mit der Kuratorin des Portikus Christina Lehnert, dem Rektor der

20

SUBJECT:FWD:UNKNOWN

Städelschule Philippe Pirotte und dem Kurator Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung erweitert und beeinflusste die Routinen ihrer kuratorischen Arbeit. Die Studierenden wurden in diese Überlegungen einbezogen, nahmen an Diskussionen teil und entwickelten davon ausgehend das Konzept zu Subject:Fwd:Unknown.

Sowohl die Kooperation mit dem Portikus als auch aktuelle gesellschaftliche Entwicklungen gaben Anlass, um über Gesprächsbedingungen und die Mechanismen von Sprache nachzudenken und eine Sensibilisierung für diese anzuregen. In letzter Konsequenz muss Kommunikation – und damit jedes gesprochene Wort, jede Geste und auch jeder künstlerischer Ausdruck – als Berührungspunkt eines vielschichtigen und kollektiven Beziehungsgeflechts verstanden werden, in dem unendlich viele Bedeutungen aufeinandertreffen. Das Projekt Subject:Fwd:Unknown sucht dieses Potenzial aufzugreifen und in einem anderen Format fortzuführen. Die eingeladenen Künstler*innen verbindet die Auseinandersetzung mit der Art und Weise, wie ein Gespräch stattfinden kann. Über Sprache und Kommunikation entwickeln sie in unterschiedlichen künstlerischen Medien Formen, wie ein Gespräch performativ, verweigernd, forschend, konkret und abstrakt gerahmt werden kann.

Als Kurator*innen begreifen wir künstlerische und kuratorische Praktiken als offene, transdisziplinäre und kommunikative Prozesse. Diese gilt es auch als solche zu gestalten.

Im Rahmen dieser Ausstellungsreihe sahen wir unsere Aufgabe darin, die Bedingungen für einen kreativen Gesprächsprozess zu schaffen, in ihn einzutreten, daran mitzuwirken und ihn zu reflektieren. Mit Subject:Fwd:Unknown möchten wir eine vielsprachige, fragmentierte Geschichte erzählen, gemeinsam mit den Künstler*innen und den Besucher*innen eine kollektive Stimme bilden, aber auch unvereinbare Aussagen nebeneinander stehen lassen.

Wo die Ausstellungsreihe auf der Weitergabe von Impulsen aufbaute, soll die vorliegende Publikation Raum geben für das zweite wesentliche Element des Gesprächs: die Reaktion.

Die verschiedenen künstlerischen Positionen werden nicht nur rückblickend betrachtet, sondern gleichzeitig zum offenen Gesprächsthema. Beschreibungen und Ansichten der einzelnen Ausstellungen bilden einen Einstieg, den vier Autor*innen mit Reaktionen, Assoziationen oder neuen Impulsen beantwortet haben. Ein Interview mit Tim Etchells sowie die Essays von Heike Gfrereis und Fiona Geuß blicken auf kunst­historische, philosophische und gesellschaftskritische Aspekte der Überführung künstlerischer Praxis in das Medium des Gesprächs. Ihre Perspektiven erweitern den Rahmen unserer Betrachtung und laden dazu ein, weitere Fäden und Netze zu spinnen.

21

DENNIS BRZEK / SARAH HEUBERGER / LEA MARIA STEINKAMPF

SUBJECT:FWD:UNKNOWN. AN EXHIBITION SERIES ON LANGUAGE AS A MEDIUM AND FORM Dennis Brzek / Sarah Heuberger / Lea Maria Steinkampf Forward, receive, forget, delete, reply. The exhibition series Subject:Fwd:Unknown is an attempt to bring different voices together in conversation. Developing new ideas, building relationships and managing conflicts – all of these human actions are only possible in conversation. The openness of the moment when two or more people communicate verbally is fundamental for a coexistence that benefits from togetherness.

Conversations provide space for spontaneous reactions, surprising ideas and unexpected connections – thoughts both circulate and evaporate. And yet, societal debates are increasingly taking place within closed chambers, where opinions are homogeneous and without objection. An open structure for conversation, in contrast, has the potential to initiate creative processes and to connect oppositional views. Therefore, the value of a conversation is not based on reaching consent, but on the process of negotiation itself, as well one’s own positioning within it. However, in public discourse, little room is provided for productive conversations, that simultaneously and self reflexively elucidate the process of their outcomes. Against this background, the consideration of conversational situations, that create conditions for exchange appears urgent.

Between October 18 and December 9 2018, four artists have been invited to successively realise projects at the exhibition space fffriedrich in Frankfurt am Main.

The four artists Michal Heiman, Nora Turato, Tim Etchells and Yutie Lee use language and communication as fundamental elements of their respective practices. Based on an approach grounded by the principal of action/reaction, the artists were invited to engage as participants in a conversation throughout the exhibition series. Over a period of six weeks, they emailed sensory impulses – images, texts or sound material – to the artist exhibiting after them. Associations triggered by this input affected the succeeding artistic position and gave rise to processes of internal negotiation and external connections that were more or less visible within the exhibition.

Starting point for the exploration of mechanisms of language, forms of communication and conversational conditions was the exhibition #215 by Leo Asemota and Nastio Mosquito, which took place at Portikus from December 1, 2018 to January 27, 2019.

Conversations between curator Christina Lehnert, Städelschule’s rector Philippe Pirotte, and curator Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung expanded the two artists’ dialogic practice, which also influenced the routines of their curatorial approaches. The students were able to take part in these considerations and participated in discussions that lay ground to the conceptual development of Subject:Fwd:Unknown.

Both the collaboration with Portikus as well as current social developments gave rise to the reflection of the current status of conversation and the mechanisms of language

22

SUBJECT:FWD:UNKNOWN

as well as an urge to foster a sensibility towards them. Ultimately, communication – every spoken word, gesture or artistic expression – can be understood as a point of contact in a multilayered and collective network of relationships in which an infinite number of meanings come together. The project Subject:Fwd:Unknown seeks to seize on this potential and to pursue it within in a different form. What unites the invited artists is their exploration of how conversations can take place. They use language and communication in different artistic media to develop forms of how a conversation can be framed performatively, refusingly, exploratively, concretely and abstractly.

As curators, we understand artistic and curatorial practices as open, transdisciplinary and communicative processes. And those have to be given a form. With this exhibition, we aimed to create the conditions for a creative conversation process, to participate in it, and to reflect on it. With Subject:Fwd:Unknown we wanted to tell a multilingual, fragmented story, to form a collective voice together with the artists and the visitors, and to let incompatible statements stand side by side.

Whereas each exhibition in the series was built on forwarded impulses, this publication provides space for the second essential element of conversation: the reaction. The artistic positions are not only be reviewed in retrospect, but are meant to become open topics for an extended conversation. Descriptions and images of the four exhibitions are the introduction to initiate and inspire four authors responses, reactions, associations, or new impulses. An interview with Tim Etchells as well as essays by Heike Gfrereis and Fiona Geuß examine art historical, philosophical and socio-critical aspects of the transfer of artistic practice into the medium of conversation. Their perspectives broaden the scope of our reflections and invite us to spin on further threads.

23

INTERVIEW WITH TIM ETCHELLS

INTERVIEW WITH TIM ETCHELLS: UNFOLDING IN TIME Dana Schütte / Leonore Spemann Dana Schütte (DS): Our first question is about which role language plays in your practice. Is there a difference in how you deal with language in different mediums like performance, sound, writing or visual art?

Tim Etchells (TE): My concerns are pretty consistent and my interest in language goes across all of my work but in every medium, different things are possible. So, when the medium shifts, for me it creates new possibilities in this exploration of language and new ways of approaching the things that interest me.

Broadly, I’m fascinated by the way that language can summon images or questions – the way that with just a small number of words you can bring an idea or an image into the room or into somebody’s mind. So, there is this capacity that language has to make pictures and questions. The other thing that interests me is the invitation language makes to the reader or viewer – that capacity language has to somehow initiate or negotiate a relation with the reader.

When you move from one medium to another the form and context of that proposal, as well as the duration of it, changes. It can take a days, weeks or months to read a novel, whereas a neon sculpture in a public space is often seen briefly in passing, in relation to the rest of the city. The temporality changes, as does the social aspect of one’s encounter with the work. We read fiction alone. But a neon sign in a gallery or public space is often encountered rather more collectively, in social space. Performance is often very social in the way we encounter it. One might see a neon several times in a period of months or see it in passing every day for a year. An artwork in that context can get into daily life in a very different way than a novel does. I like that when I move from one medium to another, the frame of the work changes in these ways – each context allows for something totally different regarding the kind of attention you can get from the viewer or the reader.

Leonore Spemann (LS): Do you think that works of art can have a dialogue with the visitor and in which way? I mean you described the relation, that your neon light sculptures initiate, but what about your sound works that kind of ‘inhabit’ the ears of the listeners?

TE: I think the encounter with an artwork is always a kind of dialogue. The artwork is a proposition, it puts some information or code or pattern into space or into social currency. And as a viewer or visitor or reader, you are always invited to see that, to read it, to engage with it in your own way. You bring things that are on your mind, your own experiences, your own thoughts. I always try to create works that are explicitly open to this dialogue or encounter with the viewer, works that are deliberately porous to the

24

UNFOLDING IN TIME

context. A neon of mine can be installed in different places, and when are seen in one place or another, they change. It’s not the same to put a work in a town in the north of England as it is to put it in the middle of Paris or London, where economically and socially very different things are happening. Something new is unlocked in the work because of the shift in context. That shift can be environmental, but it can also have to do with the visitor – because as we know every viewer brings their own baggage, thoughts and ideas. I would always think about this porousness, this element of process, in relation to my work with language, but I think it’s true for any artwork, really. Language in particular is always a process of individual unpacking – if someone says: “a chair and a table”, each of us will think of a chair and a table, but we’d all imagine them differently.

LS: That’s what Hannah Arendt says, too. She claims that there are so many perspectives that there is no perspective twice in the world. And she is not talking only about the object or the body, but also from what you called “your own thought baggage.”

TE: What she says is fundamental. I think it’s also interesting that in specific social and cultural milieu we do nonetheless share certain patterns and frames of perception … if not in fine detail but in bigger shapes I think we share so many things. I’m interested in the negotiation between what’s shared and communal and what’s private, specific and individual. That balance or battle between these two is one of the questions the artworks are tuned to.

DS: Thinking about your exhibition at fffriedrich, we discussed a lot about the fact, that sound is a kind of harder to elude than visuals. Does that mean sound can mediate content more pervasively, because it is often perceived unconsciously?

TE: That’s very true … it’s also a process, isn’t it? A sound work has time in it in a really clear way, it works in and with time, where a sculptural work or a drawing is an object and has time only in the more subtle sense that the material is decaying very slowly or via the fact that the viewers’ attention operates in and over time. Whereas a sound work literally unfolds in time. And you are right, a sound piece works on our attention in a different way because in order to perceive a drawing or sculpture you have to concretely look or maybe touch, if you are allowed to, but to hear a work, for people who can hear, you don’t really have a choice. It’s there, and you hear it.

DS: You cannot close your ears so easily.

TE: Indeed. Well it’s harder to close your ears than to close your eyes. Sound is present and persists in a different way than visual information. I guess sound also has that strange quality of becoming a filter or a color to the other senses: it washes over the scene, affecting everything you’re looking at.

DS: We were wondering how important it is for you that the voices in your sound works are embodied in a certain sense – linked to a person or speakers that are

25

INTERVIEW WITH TIM ETCHELLS

present in the exhibition space. In Subject:Fwd:Unknown it was important for you that the voices did not come from an undefined, hidden place.

TE: Well, in live performance an unamplified voice and the performing body are pretty closely linked – the voice and the body/person from which it emanates. For a sound installation presented on speakers, the speakers can be a surrogate, a puppet for an absent body or presence.

DS: The speakers almost become representatives of the people?

TE: Yes, in some cases. In my work Stand off I use four speakers on stands, facing each other in a small square. The stands hold the speakers at head height and consequently the arrangement reads easily as figures – speakers as heads on the spindly bodies of the stands. The audio on each speaker comprises variations of the phrase: “Get back. Get back. Get back”. So, the piece sets up the idea of figures standing together, locked in a four way confrontation that’s also an impasse. As a viewer you can position yourself in relation to these skeletal figures – inserting yourself into the center of their arrangement or in any place around it.

There are other works of mine – Laugh/Cry and Out Of The Picture, both of which I did with speakers on the floor – using loudspeakers from an old public address system.

The work has tangles of cable on the floor and the speakers are all pointing in different directions – it’s much more of an organic system, less like the rigid vaguely representational body forms or figures in Stand Off. But you asked how it would be if there was no visible speaker at all, if the sound was just ‘in’ the room. In that situation you wouldn’t be able to visually associate the sound to an object – the voice would be placeless, linked only to the location or to the mind of the viewer/listener.

LS: Which role does then the room play in which the work is installed?

TE: Well, even given this idea of the speakers as body/figure/body parts there’s also a temptation for me to treat the volume of the gallery itself as a more abstract place in which a particular thought or set of thoughts conjured by the voice is being worked through. As if the room were the inside of a mind. It’s an idea that’s very strongly proposed in that Bruce Nauman work of course Get Out Of My Mind, Get Out of this Room (1987).

I’m thinking of the piece Together Apart I made in Braunschweig – a sound installation using speakers across all the different rooms in the Kunstverein. In that work the whole building was a container resonating with different phrases coming from different rooms – layering, overlapping, cacophonous. When I was working on it, I always thought about the building as a mind, as a place where certain thoughts were circulating.

DS: Do you think that in the exhibition context in general there should be more conversation not only about the shown works but also between artists and their works and between visitors and artists? In our opinion conversing is crucial for curatorial work and in general: for a democratic society.

26

UNFOLDING IN TIME

TE: I think it happens in different layers. There is a kind of conversation in the way that visitors engage with artworks. What they bring, what they think, how they make connections from one thing to another. For me that’s already very active. I don’t really subscribe to the idea that the older (‘non-interactive’) forms (novels, movies, paintings etc.) are a kind of closed or one-way communication. As if interactive, participatory works have a monopoly on the idea of two-way processes between artworks and viewers. For me those older forms are already two-way, already active rather than passive. You might not affect the object, but that’s not so important to me. The idea of dialogue is always there. It’s the porousness in the artwork that I was speaking about earlier. Of course, there are forms that try more explicitly to engage, or open conversations of different kinds and I think it’s really valid, important and interesting to open that space even more.

LS: Would you then say that the live experience in the exhibition space is the most important thing in the reception of art? We are interested in your thoughts about educational programs that try to include children for example.

TE: I guess for me there is something very primary about artworks and one’s encounter with them, whatever the form. I think art is a place where at best you can be thrown into a deep and in a certain sense unexplained encounter with ideas and questions. I think being able to allow oneself to enter that situation, to take on the challenge and the responsibility of that encounter is very valuable. For me the most compelling artwork is not about offering explanations or information – it’s about trying to open different possibilities for thinking, different ways of looking. And yes, it’s about that live moment of encounter that you mention.

DS: Do you think that art can provoke change? Maybe also politically?

TE: I do. I think art can make change. It may be small change and it may be slower than people might desire. But for me, at best, art really does open people to life and its complexity as well as underscoring the interconnectedness of life – in social, economic and philosophical terms. These ideas about connectedness – relation, power, responsibility – are political questions in the end.

DS: Do your works emerge from a certain situation in your life, that is also a certain political situation, or would you say your works are timeless, in a way?

TE: Well, there is no such thing as timeless. Everything is in time. And all of these considerations that we are having – about language, about relation to viewers, about contexts, the gallery and so on – arise in this very specific way, in this very specific moment in cultural history. The concerns we have aren’t the concerns of 100 years ago. And 100 years from now our concerns may well seem rather peculiar.

Different works have a different relation to the time they’re made in of course. My Vacuum Days back in 2011 was initially an internet project in which I posted one new text work every day for a year. That work was very responsive and direct, super, super connected to the political events of the day. The Arab Spring, Fukushima, austerity,

27

INTERVIEW WITH TIM ETCHELLS

Euro-crisis, UK royal wedding, etc. – all of those were immediately and directly responded to in the text of the work.

By comparison works like To Lose Sleep and Nothing to Lose which I made for fffriedrich: doesn’t refer directly to specific events, but instead function through this great porousness in the moment one encounters them. If you come to those works in 2018 no doubt, they activate the specific set of anxious ideas and questions that are in the air for us at this point. Ten years later rather different thoughts and ideas would very likely come to mind. The work makes a proposition – it floats some thoughts – but there is enough undecided about it for a process of association and connection to take place. That’s what makes the work dynamic.

When I participated in Boris Charmatz’ Expo Zero at Tate, I was making improvised performances using fragments of texts, looping and repeating them. I played a lot with the social possibilities of working in the gallery, using the text to interact with the constant flow of people coming and going. Sometimes I was following people. Sometimes I whispered the text and sometimes I was speaking out loud, very directly to people.

Other times I was really shouting. Pushing the text and its possibilities to make links to people and the space, making relations.

I think it is interesting to wonder if, in 30 years – if I was alive to do still that work – how different would the social situation of the gallery be. Would it be okay to shout in a gallery? Or to touch people, strangers, as I do in that work? In 30 years, it could be that touching a stranger is too problematic an action to contemplate in such a space.

So, all of these works are in time. It is like you would look at a painting now, from a 100 years ago or 50 years ago. What might have seemed very natural and bold, or very expressive at the time, might look strangely mannered or formal to us now. The information is no longer available to us, no longer felt, no longer part of the context for us.

Time has moved on. And all of these works we’re making will look like something else in the future too, something that we can’t really imagine. Even works that feel very raw and fresh. Time will change them.

LS: Do you speak another language? Would your artistic practice work in another language? Is there something limiting about language and the English language in particular?

TE: I don’t speak another language. Almost everything I’ve made has been in English.

I have done some work in translation, by working very closely with other people – part translation and part collaboration in some ways.

Of course, I’d say my relation to the English language is like that of any native speaker to their own language. It is embodied, and it is very intuitive. My work with text is very much about feeling my way, not super technical. I didn’t have a very classical education.

In the broader sense there are certain specific things one needs to note about English of course; it’s a colonizer’s language and care of the dubious legacy of British history, and more recently thanks to America’s position and influence, it continues to have a global

28

UNFOLDING IN TIME

currency. That currency is connected to economic and political power and to oppression and exploitation, so the ubiquity of the language is at once a blessing and a kind of curse or shadow, fortuitous and uncomfortable.

English also has certain specific qualities that are important to me. Often the language that I use – in performances, sculptures and drawings – plays with the fact that in English certain things don’t have to be specified, which is another thing that can lead quite concretely to the kind of conceptual and narrative porousness that we were talking about earlier. I have one neon work that simply says, “You will live forever”. And the particular nature of English language (as opposed to German or Dutch or many others) is that the text doesn’t have to specify if the ‘you’ is particular or general. The pronoun is the same if it’s singular or plural – ‘you’ – and the same if it’s masculine or feminine ‘you’. Often my work in English relies, builds on and raises questions about these very particular capacities of simplicity and ambiguity.

LS: Have we spoken enough? Is there a limit of talking? How much talking is effective?

Do more discussions lead to more results and movement? That was what we were wondering in retrospect. In the context of our project Subject:Fwd:Unknown a lot was said, in many different ways. There is so much hope in conversation as a form of rapprochement and mutual understanding in contemporary art production and beyond.

TE: It is a political question. The world is made in very different ways and for me some of the tasks (certainly of my work) are to raise questions and sensitize people to complexities, to foster discontent and to draw attention to the tensions and difficulties of the situation that we are all in. It is never like an action plan. Mostly for me the artwork isn’t a statement either. We can say that the artwork is in some senses ‘like talking’ but it is clearly not a statement. For me at best the artwork is a complicated object, a disquieting object. An object that is designed to produce imbalance. One’s hope is that this imbalance gets solved somewhere else, outside the realm of art. That the artwork has an extension – a life and an energy that needs to be resolved in another space. But it is not programmatic. I know there are artists who work differently, but the work that I value isn’t programmatic either, it is problematic.

The disquiet that comes from the encounter with artworks is something that as a viewer or spectator you are at liberty to take up somewhere else. And people do that in their own very different ways – by taking better care of themselves, their families and their neighbors. Or they do it by protesting, or by organizing, or by doing other things in the world. And as artists and makers we can’t know exactly how all those processes will play out, but I do think that at best the artwork has a capacity to change us. I have never really seen an artwork that interests me as having a sort of programmatic one-toone-relation to a problem. It is more about creating more problems than solving them.

DS / LS: Thank you very much, Tim.

29