Óscar Ardila
Artists: Cécile Belmont | Nezaket Ekici | Wolfram Kastner | Margarete Rabow | Ute Reeh | Maya Saravia | Santiago Sierra | Roberto Uribe.
Curated by: Oscar Ardila and Stefan Krüskemper
"Affecting Memory" provides a look at selected international positions of performative action art, which radically break away from traditional ideas of memorials and monuments with their multiple perspectives.
On display is a performative culture of commemoration as a movement that has developed independently in the form of participatory processes, temporary interventions, and political performances. The question of how art can become socially fruitful, initiate healing processes, and exert political influence is the focus of the confrontation between an alternative anti-fascist post-war culture of remembrance and the global culture of remembrance currently characterized by post-colonialism. In this way, alternatives are offered to this culture of remembrance, which is currently largely determined by mourning, in which irony, humor, and subversion play a constructive and depolarizing role in order to open up emotionally charged problem areas of memory anew and to think differently.
The eight artists participating in the exhibition "set in motion" our habitual ways of remembering when, on the one hand, they target other kinds of emotions around the conflicts of the past and, on the other hand, "change" typical representations of memory by offering other materialities, other bodies, and other ways of recording and transmitting memory.
Curated by Oscar Ardila and Stefan Krüskemper