LO(L) – EMBODIED LANGUAGE
Guided tour & Performance by Barbara Kapusta
FoyerHall
Guided tour through the exhibition with curator Anna Nowak, 6 pm
Performance by Barbara Kapusta, 7 pm
Registration via
Barbara Kapusta, performing As Many Holes and Folds as Can Be, 2019 at Monday Gelato curated by Benedikt Seerieder, Karlsruhe, 2019
In the text accompanying the animated images of The Leaking Bodies, unusually poetic for a political work, Barbara Kapusta opens up an associative field along the tracks of ,flows' – capital flows, crude oil transports, drinking water, but also bodily fluids – in which the topics of migration, exploitation of resources, the narrative of the desert as an inhospitable place, the privatization of water, the advance of people into the most remote areas up until Covid-19 are directly connected to each other: "A slimy, slippery mixture on dry, yellow grass and corroding iron. Slowly contaminating every part and cell of our wet and fragile existence."
"The combination of language and text with objects, sculptural and animated bodies, of letters with numbers, hard and soft material is characteristic of the artist's work, which deals with the materiality and linguistic constitution of bodies in her installations, animations and lecture performances.“ – Christa Benzer
The exhibition LO(L) – Embodied Language, combining various artistic approaches in large-format text, sound and video installations, examines how language, writing, images and sounds connect us digitally in real time and permeate our living and working worlds. Recent developments in information and communication technology, including the challenges and opportunities they present, are critically discussed in this group exhibition.
Curated by Anna Nowak
A central, recurring element in Barbara Kapusta’s (*1983, lives and works in Vienna) practice is the conjunction of the body with materiality and speech. In her object-like installation and film works, fictional bodies articulate partial perspectives and queer agency, with the aim of challenging a universal, binary societal order. The artist explores current issues regarding the relationship between corporeal identity and an existence determined by technology. The body becomes perceivable as a permeable and malleable medium threatened by fragmentation and heteronomy. Through its own capacity of transformation, however, it likewise possesses a resistant, self-determined potential to withstand access from outside in a techno-human world.