Pro(s)thesis & Posthuman Complicities
Left: Pro(s)thesis: Mari Katayama, bystander #016, 2016, Lambda Print. Courtesy of the artist
Right: Posthuman Complicities: Stefanie Schwarzwimmer, (Un-)Mapped (with cat paw detail), 2017, Mixed Media. Courtesy of the artist.
The exhibition Pro(s)thesis explores the technological penetration of the human body, which has been culturally accepted in the meantime on a large scale. The field of problems opening up with this development reveals the human physique as the central medium of the access to man, its vulnerability providing the anthropological premise for the machinations of power structures.
Curators: Berenice Pahl, Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein
Architecture: Dorit Margreiter
Artists: Renate Bertlmann (AUT), Lisa Bufano (USA), Virginia Chihota (ZIM), Chitka (Anetta Mona Chişa & Lucia Tkáčová) (CZE/SVK), Erika Fransson (SWE), Kerstin von Gabain (USA/AUT), Judith Hopf (GER), Rebecca Horn (GER), Anne Imhoff (GER), Birgit Jürgenssen (AUT), Mari Katayama (JPN), Brigitte Lang (AUT), Roberta Lima (BRA/AUT), Kumi Machida (JPN), Iris L. Moore (CAN), Nadine Rennert (GER), Barbis Ruder (AUT), Toni Schmale (AUT), Anne Schneider (AUT), Evelin Stermitz (AUT), Angela Su (HKG), Viktoria Tremmel (AUT), Anna Vasof (GRC/AUT)
Posthuman Complicities presents artworks concerned with the Atlantic, the deep sea, and concepts of fluidity. The ocean features as a place of violence and resistance. Colonial archives are fragmented and dislocated in terms of both language and image in order to visualize blank spaces created by historiography.
The filmic and poetic exploration of the Zong massacre constitutes the core of the exhibition. In 1781, the British slaver Zong sailed from Accra to Black River in Jamaica. 150 slaves were thrown overboard into the sea to drown because of economic interests. This incident can only be reconstructed on the basis of the documents surviving from the lawsuit between the slaver’s owner and the insurers. Both the poet M. NourbeSe Philip and The Otolith Group deal with the massacre and its aftermath.
Curators: Andrea Popelka, Lisa Stuckey
Artists: Viltė Bražiūnaitė (LTU/AUT) & Tomas Sinkevičius (LTU/SWE), Joey Holder (GBR), Paul Maheke (FRA/GBR), Jennifer Mattes (AUT), The Otolith Group (GBR), M. NourbeSe Philip (CAN), Stefanie Schwarzwimmer (AUT/DEU) , Wolfgang Tillmans (DEU)
exhibition until May 19, 2017