Exhibition "Journey Through A Body" in the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf

„Journey Through A Body“ in der Kunsthalle
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Dreamed body worlds

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Cajsa von Zeipel: “X plus X equals x”, 2021
Photo: Kunsthalle / Katja Illner

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The Kunsthalle becomes the academy of burning questions: The exhibition “Journey Through A Body” creates an exciting new picture of identity and gender.

This exhibition is also so important because it takes contemporary art first as a medium that provides information about the constitution of people, that is, literally forms an image of it. Viewed in this way, the Kunsthalle acts as a laboratory, a darkroom in which social processes become visible. It enriches the discourse, it helps to see more clearly, to become more attentive. And that is exactly the ideal that a collective exhibition of young perspectives can and should achieve

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The show is called “Journey Through A Body”. You can experience works by six artists who were born after 1981 and who think about sexuality and gender ascriptions, ultimately about individuality, consciousness and home. The focus is always on the body, but not as a biological definition, but as a carrier of ideas for alternative designs for fluid sexuality. The possibilities of the internet and the resulting digital image offer scope to define new identities, to relate oneself to the other in a new way.

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Cajsa von Zeipel creates figures that seem like cyborgs that appear feminine when dancing. They are intertwined and connected to one another on a pole dance pole. A tube leads from the heel of one of them into a plexiglass cube into which a DNA helix has been lasered. So an act of procreation? Nicole Ruggiero shows how to communicate with one another on the Internet, how close you can get to one another without touching, and how the quality of what is closeness changes in the process. In her video work, Kate Cooper puts a suit on an avatar, which protects and weakens the body at the same time, makes it difficult to assign it to a gender and is constantly changing in shape and form.

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The curators Alicia Holthausen and Gregor Jansen borrowed the name of the exhibition from the album of the same name by the industrial band Throbbing Gristle. The record from 1982 is a particularly wild and blatant one within the group’s already consistently radical catalog. In a sound collage, for example, hospital noises can be heard. Genesis P-Orridge, a member of Throbbing Gristle, and – as Diedrich Diederichsen writes in the accompanying reader – a person who slowly slipped into the plural until her death last year also acts as the house saint of the show. Orridge changed his body, his goal was, so to speak, to be absorbed in his man of life, Lady Jaye Breyer, to merge with him and to overcome the limits of biology in an act of “pandrogeny”. After all, he felt himself to be “they” across all genders, and so it must be: Genesis P. Orridge were pioneers.

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Tschbalala Self reflects femininity from the perspective of people of color in her work. Christina Quarles creates portraits of ambivalent bodies that cannot be grasped with constructions like “trans” or “queer”. And Luki von der Gracht documents how nice it is to step out into the open, to step out of oneself into freedom. And at the same time: How dangerous it can be there. Because the outside is always the unprotected space of a new order and a new and not untrained and therefore only to be defined togetherness. In general, some of the works shown here are primed by melancholy.

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This is an exciting exhibition, it does not leave you indifferent, because it refers to the pressure to change that results from growing social awareness of topics such as inclusion and diversity. So it’s great that there is an illuminating reader on the one hand. Above all, the “text” Dreaming The Body – Queering The Image “by Magdalena Kröner shines here, placing this exhibition in the tradition. Kröner writes that the visual arts have always tried to outline the essence of human beings when dealing with the human body. And the body as a universal symbol has now detached itself from everything that previously represented home and origin and gender.

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There are also a number of events such as the “For Today I Am A Boy” workshop by Daniela Georgieva and Hugo Le Brigand. Even a vinyl single was produced especially for the show, with a track by Baal & Mortimer and one by Automat feat. Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.

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With “Journey Through A Body” the Kunsthalle becomes a contemporary seminar, an academy of burning questions. Something is afoot, you notice there, we are in a state of flux, and together you ask yourself the question that Magdalena Kröner formulates in her accompanying text: Which of these can be used as the engine of a changeable, open, integrative society?

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Exhibition “Journey Through A Body” in the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf

„Journey Through A Body“ in der Kunsthalle
:
Dreamed body worlds

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