The Still Life of Vernacular Agents
Michele Abeles, Lutz Bacher, Getho J. Baptiste, Peter Coffin, Kendra Frorup, Celeur J. Herard, Adriana Lara, Katja Novitskova, Racine Polycarpe, Fatima Al Qadiri and Thunder Horse Video, Evel Romain, Ettore Sottsass
curated by Nadine Zeidler
2/6/12 – 4/8/12
The Still Life of Vernacular Agents is an assembly of works that come together to negotiate the following agenda:
High definition imagery, digital manufacturing, genetic engineering, and increasingly refined forms of virtual communication foster the debate on how these new realms of hybrid mediators challenge our concepts of being and reality.
The schizophrenia of division – between culture and nature, subject and object, life and death – as introduced by the Enlightenment has already been detected. A critical break with the supposed tribal naiveté – that interpreted natural objects as signals for human affairs, and which likewise viewed human songs and magic spells as potential forces of nature – did not really take place. While modern society became comfortable in its empire of dualism, it actually never stopped producing hybrids and networks. Threatening the categories of rationality, they were sent off to populate repressed spaces and the unconscious of the modern mind.
The expanding network of agents that connects subjects and objects in multiple forms and changing constellations calls for a new preoccupation with these mediators that make things talk, and through which references can be mobilized.
Michele
Abeles, Lutz Bacher, Getho J. Baptiste, Peter Coffin, Kendra Frorup, Celeur J.
Herard, Adriana Lara, Katja Novitskova, Racine Polycarpe, Fatima Al
Qadiri
and Thunder Horse Video, Evel Romain, Ettore Sottsass, Nadine
Zeidler, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin