S2: Independence Day II

S2: Independence Day II
23.03.2017 - 20.05.2017

Julia Bondesson, Mimosa Echard, Rodrigo Hernandez, Veit Laurent Kurz, Lea von Wintzingerode

Curated by Oriane Durand & Line Ebert

The exhibition title Independence Day II, refers to the eponymous 2015 Hollywood film sequel. Similarly, the concept of the exhibition aligns itself to a simple outline of the film’s narrative; individuals from every horizon and country of the world join together in order to defeat a monstrous and malevolent alien kind, representing the invading and greater Other.

The narrative, as we understand it, is a clear caricature of a specific trope, in which the humankind, when facing an external threat, becomes small and powerless and all its technological advances render useless. However, as humanity starts uniting, lead forward by a few heroic individuals, the summoned forces amounts to unexpected potency. As a trope, it deals with the realization of human insignificance in a greater perspective. A parallel metaphor to this idea can be found in the way ants behave: alone they cannot do much, whereas together, they build a productive social system. Understood through this principle of unity, smallness does not correlate to fragility and its size as such doesn’t matter; what counts is the joint energy of an organization of the many in a spontaneous order. The exhibition is interested in this psychological compound of activity and effect of the seemingly insignificant and plentiful.

In this regard, Independence Day II is occupied with a recent spreading gesture in the young contemporary art context around miniaturized ecosystems and attempts to insert this tendency in a discursive frame. How can smaller entities express something powerful, threatening, magical or even terrible? Or in what way might it be a reaction to a current social and political situation? These are questions that are ardent for us.

Within an aesthetic that contains a trajectory between something archaic and science fictional, a distorted Arcadian vision and dystopian hybrid intelligences, Independence Day II presents works by Julia Bondesson (1983 in Kinnared, lives in Killeberg, Sweden), Mimosa Echard (1986 in Alès, France, lives in Paris), Veit Laurent Kurz (1985 in Erbach, Germany, lives in Berlin), Rodrigo Hernandez (1983 in Mexico City, lives in Basel) and Lea von Wintzingerode(*1990 in Bayreuth, Germany, lives in Berlin).