Apocalypse A_AP @Biennale Halberstadt

Date: 08 2018
Tags: → Art
→ Concept
→ Exhibition
→ Installation
→ Spatial
Links: www.mkh-biennale.de
With: Marius Förster
Kristina Fromm

Togehter with Marius Förster and Kristina Fromm we have been asked to develop an art installation for the this year’s Biennale in Halberstadt (Germany). The Biennale is taking place from the 31st august till the 29th of september under the motto “climates of change” and is curated by Pippa Koszerek from London.

Excerpt from the curatorial statement: […] Climates of change brings together artists who look at changing systems – social, financial and architectural – and artists whose work seeks to directly create and disrupt change through the invention of alternative mechanisms.
For its third edition, MKH Biennale will look through the eyes and experiments of artists at the changing social, political, cultural, environmental and historical climates that we are living through to ask, How do artists comprehend, influence and make change in the world? and What can we as a community do now?. […]

Apocalypse A_AP @Biennale Halberstadt 2018, Marius Förster, Jacqueline Hen, Installation Art, Geodestic Dome, Temporary Libary

Apocalypse A_AP @Biennale Halberstadt 2018, Marius Förster, Jacqueline Hen

Apocalypse A_AP @Biennale Halberstadt 2018, Marius Förster, Jacqueline Hen, Installation Art, Geodestic Dome, Temporary Libary

Concept

„The [awareness of the] ecological crisis is nothing but the sudden turning around of someone who had actually never before looked into the future, so busy was He* extracting Himself from a horrible past.“ (Latour)

Latour draws a picture of humankind that is destroying its own future by looking at its past and running away from it in fear. Only recently the humans managed to turn around, facing the future and seeing the destruction they had created behind their backs – and still do.So do we have no future at all? Where are we heading at? Apocalypse? Again?

For Latour, one reason for the disengagement referring to the causes and effects of the ecological crisis is that the moderns still believe living after the apocalypse rather than before. Accepting the idea of an apocalypse approaching us, how one may not be petrified? Now we’re standing on a shaky ground that crumbles our world view and forcing us to find new ways of acting while even „defining problems“ seems to be an endless Odyssee.

Apocalypse A_AP tries to transform the multitude of paradoxes into a breeding ground for productive thoughts. By mixing fiction and theory it provides access to overlapping discourses within design, art, and humanities. The installation embraces dialogue and reflection with the aim to decompose myopic views.

The visitor is invited to loose one’s hold on everyday reality, exploring the uncertain chaotic cosmos that we have been stacking behind our backs – landscapes bristle with cracks and holes that might branch into possible path for action.

Denying Denialism, escaping Escapism, and not doing things for the sake of doing things, action can be understood as the task to „build(ing) a common world […] from utterly heterogeneous parts that will never make a whole, but at best a fragile, revisable and divers composite material.“ (Latour)

*the „He“ is intended by the author as a critique of the masculine supremacy

Timeline

Opening
31.08.2018-29.09.2018

Readings
01.09.2018 15:00h
14.09.2018 19:00h
29.09.2018 17:00h

Artisttalk
15.09.2018

Artisttalk Biennale Halberstadt Vernissage, Jacqueline Hen and Marius Förster

Jacqueline Hen