Philipp Gehmacher: It is a balancing act to live without your attention.

The process and the performative aspect in working on the fragmented, multi-body self of a joint text emerging from Philipp Gehmacher’s, Jen Rosenblit’s and Gérald Kurdian’s biographies are at the heart of It is a balancing act to live without your attention. After dealing with ascriptions of institutional spaces of the performing and visual arts in my shapes, your words, their grey (2013) and wandering through Dinge der Welt (2017), Philipp Gehmacher now focuses on biography, identity, realism and abstraction. The desire to communicate runs parallel to an understanding that one’s own biography is the most delicate terrain of such communication. Philipp Gehmacher contrasts the concrete nature of one’s own biography, its production by way of a public statement describing oneself with a wariness of exactly this reification. In being with others, in suspending the description of oneself, in being singularly plural, in attempting to describe oneself in a fragile collective lie the means to dissolve the biography. It remains a balancing act to be able to live without your attention.