hybrID

Captions see below

hybrID
Taysir Batniji, James Bridle, Nidhal Chamekh, Aleksandra Domanović, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Admire Kamudzengerere, Rachel Monosov, Raqs Media Collective, Slavs and Tatars, The Otolith Group, Sung Tieu, Helena Wittmann, Guan Xiao

3 September – 17 November 2019

Opening
Monday, 2 September 2019, 7 pm
Speakers: Katja Schroeder (Artistic Director), Anna Nowak (Curator)
Following: Rachel Monosov, Sung Tieu (Performances)

The theme of cultural diversity is more relevant than ever today throughout Europe. In July 2018, The Brussels Declaration – For the Freedom of the Arts was published stating: “Culture emerges through exchange, not through isolation.” Currently, the initiative Wir sind Viele (We Are Many) is taking a strong stand for a diverse and solidary art and culture scene.

The exhibition hybrID starts from these discourses. The aim of the project is to discuss from an artistic point of view the ambivalence and complexity of spatial and cultural localization in our globally connected world.

Through digital communication and the rapidity of technological developments we are living in a time of transformation. We must constantly learn to reorient ourselves, since new technologies such as apps are impacting our daily lives and information flows are appearing to become ever more complex and non-transparent. Owing to the trend toward individualization processes, one’s own identity is regarded as something that must be permanently optimized. This has become the fundamental obsession of our present lives. Identity is defined not only through unmistakable individuality but also constitutes our social sense of belonging. Especially in the current social debates and political polarizations, the concept is mainly being misused and associated all over the world with notions of the local and original as a means to reinforce power structures. But the complexity of cultural globalization—who we are, how we evolve, and how we relate to our fellow human beings—is not taken into consideration in a differentiated way.

In our multi-mobile age, in which national discourses are inextricably linked to international developments, the understanding of a sense of belonging as something static, geographically anchored, must urgently be called into questions. Not only at the moment are flight and displacement leading to waves of migration in many places, humankind has migrated throughout the most part of its history. Cultures are therefore never homogeneous, they always emerge through exchange with other cultures, reciprocal acceptance and demarcation—they are hybrid.

The exhibition hybrID is a contemporary reflection on identity construction in the context of technological, political and historical developments. It brings together international artists grasping identity as an open construction that refers to global interconnections and hybridity. The artists address and analyze the contradictory tendencies between networking on the one side and the increasing trend to solidify borders on the other. Their themes range from identification and self-localization to uprootedness and the question of national borders. In complex ways, the artworks reflect the relations of cause and effect of digitization against the background of global relationships.

Curator: Anna Nowak

Tuesday, 3 September, 7 pm
Artist talk
Admire Kamudzengerere, Helena Wittmann, Anna Nowak (Moderation)
Video-Documentation here.

Monday, 7 October, 7 pm
Lecture-Performance
Red-Black Thread with Slavs and Tatars
Video-Documentation here. 

Monday, 11 November, 7 pm
Lecture-Performance
On Numbers and their Shadows by Shuddhabrata Sengupta (Raqs Media Collective)
Video-Documentation here. 

Guided tours 
Sunday, 22 September, 3 pm
Thursday, 24 Oktober, 6 pm
Friday, 15 November, 1 pm