Scrambled Ontologies: A Fabulation

Sies + Höke in Carlstadt Poststr. 2+3 / Orangeriestr. 6, 40213 Düsseldorf

Oct 21st — Dec 22nd, 2022

Scrambled Ontologies: A Fabulation

Groupshow curated by Victoria Tarak

Yalda Afsah, Mary Bauermeister, Grupo Mexa, Jaca, Zoe Leonard, Jorge Loureiro, A.L. Steiner + robbinschilds, Anna R. Winder

Scrambled Ontologies - A Fabulation is a group exhibition based on critical engagement with current research on “wildness” from Jack Halberstam, Tavia Nyongo, and José Esteban Muñoz. In here, the term "wildness" seeks to capture new perspectives of polyphony and solidarity beyond capitalist, colonialist, and heteronormative structures. “Wildness” does not refer to a return of an alleged primitivism or a colonial imaginary, but rather, negotiates meanings and representations by proposing a “disorder of things” (1) . The ideas around “wildness” are concerned with reclaiming a myriad of agencies and mean to enable reflections on aesthetic experience that encounter the unspeakable, wayward or unscripted actions, engagement in the margins or within unstable everyday realities.

Although seemingly intangible,“space” and “time”, just like modes of being and action, aim to be mastered by systems of order and classification. In analogy with human-nature relations, these processes of appropriation can be understood as “domestication”, thus, an attempt to tame and regulate. In search of liberation and contradictory or ambivalent approaches to these entities, the exhibition spans a fictional web of perspectives and treatments, proposing alternatives to prevailing regimes of space and time.

Like a whisk whipping up a blend and bringing different ingredients into contact with each other, the artistic positions in Scrambled Ontologies - A Fabulation stir different temporalities and places together. They search for glitches, register autonomous zones, incite time travel, or formulate new threshold spaces.

In the midst of where we are and at the same time imagining worlds that seem distant or intangible from our own immediate reality, the exhibition brings together works that focus on the empowering efficacy of fabulation and the ghostly resonance between fact and fiction. The result is a meshwork of real and imagined spaces as well as internal and external architectures, all of which produce displacement, distortion and a doubling of time.

( 1 ) Halberstam , Jack: Wild Things: The disorder of desire, London, 2020, S.12