Transgressions of the Real

An exhibition of the Büchsenhausen Fellowship Program for Art and Theory 2020-21.

curated by Andrei Siclodi

OPENING: Thursday 17 June 2021, 18.00 – 22.00
DURATION OF THE EXHIBITION: 18 June 2021 – 7 August 2021
OPENING HOURS: Wed – Fri 12.00 – 18.00; Sat 11.00 – 15.00

The visit of the exhibition is possible only in accordance with the current legal COVID-19 regulations.

Flyer

In Transgressions of the Real, the participants of the Fellowship Program 2020-21 in Büchsenhausen present works that hypostatize the real as socio-political scenarios of the present. The phenomenon of “flags of convenience” and the transformations concerning legislation and employment associated with this “territorial expansion” of national states, the representation of violence without reproducing violent images, counter-narratives of the achievement of statehood in regard to Telangana, India’s youngest state, as well as strategies of commemmoration at socially contested sites in Thessaloniki constitute the thematic focus upon which the artistic works have been developed.

Lacan understood the real as “something that absolutely resists symbolization”¹ and at the same time is ejected from the ego.² Thus, this iconoclastic conception of the “unimaginable” does not tolerate any engagement beyond the constructed reality. And yet, it continuously resonates within, as its imagination would be then just as impossible. Consequently, the works assembled in this exhibition can be viewed in at least two ways which may well overlap. On the one hand, the exhibition refers to a violation of the taboo, an unforeseen transgression of the real, capable of shaking reality in its naturalized fixation, which in turn enables disarrangements of perception. On the other hand, it is an attempt to hold up a broken mirror to hegemonic narratives of contemporary social order that are still entrenched in the myth of the national state. In combination with reflections, shadows and fragments of largely neglected aspects of these orders, this mirror can reveal a possibly unexpected potential of emancipatory knowledge.

Upon entering the exhibition, which has transformed the space of the Kunstpavillon into a walk-in pseudo-camera Obscura, one encounters Ash Moniz’s video installation To Be Inconvenienced. On two low-hanging displays, a fable-like narration of vacant architectures, lost triumphs, the harvesting of sovereignties and unlocalizable jurisdictions is told. In short video sequences and dialogues, a complex picture of a quasi-irresolvable condition unfolds in an as-if mode, constituted predominantly against a mountainous setting, in order to speak of a situative complex at the other end of the geo-economic spectrum – the phenomenon of the flags of convenience. The global trade economy heavily depends on this capitalist logic that operates since the end of the Second World War. Outflagging of cargo ships stands for exchanging the flag of one national state with another (such as Panama or Liberia, to name but two of the best-known examples) in order to save costs. Dislocated areas of a sovereign territory are thus subjected to a regime of lenient registration requirements and poor labor conditions, turning them into “floating buildings” for a high seas proletariat. Ash Moniz addresses this situation with a forensic-like analysis in close exchange with juridic experts on maritime labor sovereignty. In an attempt to comprehend the exploitative absurdity of the naturalized status quo in all its complexity, the artist stages situations and dialogues that are, at first glance, geographically impossible, but accurate from a legal point of view.

Mykola Ridnyi’s work Speck in the Eye also examines a perceived impossibility: the difficulty of dealing artistically with images of violence without reproducing the visual violence they contain. In a series of works created in recent years, the Ukraine-based artist has addressed the problem of the increasing amount of violence in the media and in everyday life in Ukraine. The photo installation, developed together with an audio work in the course of his fellowship in Büchsenhausen, continues this investigation. Here, Mykola Ridnyi has applied small “patches” to five large-format pictures that show geological sediments-like looking structures: These stickers document so-called “blind protests” that took place all over the world – among others in Chile, Egypt, Hong Kong, Kashmir, Palestine or Georgia – and became known as demonstrations in solidarity with victims of police or paramilitary brutality, in consequence of which they had lost their eyes or suffered from severe eye injuries. Although the pictures, at first glance, resemble contingent abstractions, they are microscopic images of the eye structure, showing injuries caused by external forces. These ophthalmological samples provide evidence of the real consequences of state violence, which is inscribed in the organic structure of the citizens’ bodies. Ridnyi transforms these quasi-physical abstractions into a public space by pasting images of solidarity with the victims of violence taken from mass media. Two radiophonic audio pieces enhance the work’s media spectrum and collage acoustically with the images.

In his installation and the Rain Trees… Kush Badhwar also employs the method of collage, though in a different form. What seems to be a simple technical overlapping of a video on a vintage CRT monitor with the projection of analogue slides on its screen turns out to be a complex examination of imagery and historicity, of the potential of iterative seeing and the shifting of historical consciousness when “grand narratives” are questioned. The project owes its name, Rain Trees (Enterlobium Saman), to the species’ reference in a small volume on the history of Osmania University in Hyderabad, India. However, the book omits the politics that has been pursued on the university campus over several generations and which, among other things, contributed to the creation of Telangana, India’s 29th and youngest state, in 2014. Badhwar’s project began as research in archives, libraries and personal collections of material relating to the founding of Telangana and the preceeding long-lasting political movements that led to and catalyzed this process. In the course of this research, Badhwar chanced upon a collection of materials of a professor of ancient Indian history and archaeology. Shortly after that, he found himself in possession of this collection. The ambivalence of the narrative modes, connecting as well as differentiating the professor’s collection and the official foundation of the state forms the basis of this artistic investigation.
In the course of the Fellowship in Büchsenhausen, Badhwar developed the project’s first materialization, which can be now seen in the exhibition. In terms of both form and content, the installation enters into a critical dialogue with the professor’s photo and video material, sometimes in combination with the artist’s own footage. The binarity originally inherent in the relationship between the narrative of the founding of the state versus possible alternative historical scenarios is reflected in the loops, overlaying two perspectives – that of the professor and that of the artist – with the same images and sequences. At the same time, the visually appealing, multi-layered relationship between the electronic and the literally shone-through images complicates the supposed unambiguity and, thus, initiates a reflexive thought process that enables new perspectives.

The fourth contribution to the exhibition, Yara Haskiel‘s video Precarious Twilight Zones, examines the historiography of the unwritten that manifests itself beyond evident cracks in the collective memory and makes traumatic as well as traumatising experiences and events discernible in the materiality of social space. Matei Bellu writes, “Precarious Twilight Zones tells the story of an erasure, an annihilation, an absence. The history of the Jewish Thessaloniki remains inscribed in the memories of the living and the material testimony of the stones. The camera follows a young protagonist as she uses her body to reassemble the urban space with a web of connections, encircling the fragmented and scattered absence and searching for visibility that rearticulates the past via material traces and appearances in the present. In doing so, both the continuities and the cracks of the nationalist as well as modernist Hellenisation project become perceivable, the latter which is carried forward in the neoliberal dispossession and violence that, to this day, ‘keeps piling wreckage’. Her dreamlike walk through the city is rhythmized by a seemingly never-ending sunset – that could also be interpreted as a sunrise – in the light of which the space appears so flat, that not even her body leaves a trace of its shadow.
Against the cleansed voids of Hellenistic historiography and modernist urban planning, purged of entanglements and contradictions, the film develops its own poetic instruments of witnessing, writing and reading. Precarious Twilight Zones rejects a coherent discourse of self-contained and independent narratives, allowing the traces sedimented in the present to find their own language, in which the construction of a Greek nation superimposes present-day neoliberal precarity and austerity. A historic topography of vulnerable surfaces emerges, as well as of layered temporalities and transitional zones, in which material reality itself seems to be inscribed by affects.”
In addition to the film, two other pieces are on display in the exhibition: a banner used in the film with the Ladino saying “The dead knows nothing, everything is in the eye of the living“, along with two historical postcards: a photograph of the Muslim cemetery in Thessaloniki, mistakenly described as “Jewish cemetery“, and a view of Thessaloniki Bay at twilight, overlooked from the actual Jewish cemetery.

Andrei Siclodi

^{1 Seminar 1. Meeting of February 17, 1954; Miller/Hamacher, p.89
2 https://lacan-entziffern.de/reales/25048-das-reale}

Kush Badhwar’s project is also supported by the Government of New South Wales Australia under the funding program Create NSW – Arts, Screen & Culture.
Yara Haskiel’s project is also supported by DAGESH – Jewish Art in Context, Asylum Arts and Allianz Kulturstiftung.

Artists: