right: LO(L) – Embodied Language, Kunsthaus Hamburg, 2022, photo: Hayo Heye
Kunsthaus Hamburg
Friday, 8 April 2022, 6:15 pm
Performance with Gerry Bibby
Registration via register@kunsthaushamburg.de
The artistic work of Gerry Bibby (*1977, lives and works in Berlin) defies classification into rigid categories. His sculptures and installations also comprise performance based elements and self composed texts. He addresses the socioeconomic conditions and production possibilities underlying the creation of contemporary artworks, to combine them with an implicit critique of capitalism.
His work Visions of Excess (2020) consists of an exploration of how to be present without being physically present. The works featured at Kunsthaus Hamburg were originally created for the Busan Biennial (2020). For the port city of Hamburg, Bibby has developed a new recording performance with local actors that will now be performed for the first time on April 8, 2022 at Kunsthaus Hamburg.
Artist’s statement:
“Visions of Excess 1—12 consisted of two groups of sculpture, while In Concert was its 13th performance based element, and took the texts from parts 8—12 out into the city of Busan.
All 13 parts were informed by destabilized notions of site, the body & presence in art, and like most other aspects of a planet under extreme pressure, amplified by the pandemic, all processes were filtered through technologies of (mis)communication & distance.
In Concert opened lines of contact & intimacy with South Korea that attempted to subvert accelerated tech-assisted surveillance logics that not only led to involuntary ‘outings’ of gays or queers & theirs friends in Seoul at the time of the works’ making, but to the loss of jobs. Through these channels opportunities to invite LGBTQI+ people from the city into the Biennale were established, whilst simultaneously taking fragments of the work into public space.
Between the 25-28th of August 2020, the phone that tracked the movements of an onsite interlocutor was used to record the reading performances & a sound piece was created that can be heard at the Kunsthaus.
Although conditions in Germany for most LGBTQI+ people & communities are at least in part less threatening, homophobic backlash & victimisation proliferates across Europe, and so just as a file can be re-formatted to enable compatibility with new hardware, In Concert moves from harbour city Busan to Hamburg.’
After establishing relationships with people in the city, more data will be collected over numerous days at various sites around Hamburg, including a gathering with live reading/recordings at the Kunsthaus & beyond on the 8th April 2022.”
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
Further accompanying programme
Registration via register@kunsthaushamburg.de
Tuesday, 12 April 2022, 6 pm [via Zoom]
Panel discussion: On Words in War Times
Details will follow soon.
Wednesday, 13 April 2022
Guided tour through the exhibition with curator Anna Nowak, 6 pm
Performance by Barbara Kapusta, 7 pm
Thursday, 28 April 2022, 6 pm
On the inscription of the body in digital interactions
Lecture by Prof. Dr. Jannis Androutsopoulos &
Prof. Dr. Heike Zinsmeister (University of Hamburg)