Resilience: A term that has become part of everyday vocabulary by now and is regarded as a key competence for countering exhaustion, vulnerability, fragility and precariousness through one’s own efforts. But what if that doesn’t work out – what if the exceptional state becomes permanent?
These questions form the starting point of a conversation between the artist Anike Joyce Sadiq and the choreographer and performer Laurie Young taking place at D21 Kunstraum. The “embracements”, sculptural imprints and manifestations of a state of exhaustion, are a core element of the exhibition. They do not only negotiate the disruptive potential of exhaustion, but also the possibilities of reorientation and encounter that can arise from this state. What happens if the state of exhaustion isn’t averted and overcome, but studied and acknowledged? Is it possible to question categories like dysfunctionality and to re-think normality by relying on intuition and improvisation? What would an homage to the tired body look like? While looming for answers to these questions, Sadiq and Young examine the exhausted body’s social, psychological, and physical state — invite visitors to reconsider the relation of freezing, stagnating, and pausing.
Sadiq’s work “Visited by a Tiger” is also part of the exhibition in which the artist uses pictures of her own fist as a starting point for re-thinking the role of the self as part of the political fight against oppression. In her artistic practice, Sadiq discusses the precarious border between the self and the others and between subject and society. How can we create an awareness for the structural commonality of individual experiences and based on that, a supraindividual collective strength?
Based upon this, D21 Kunstraum will be converted into a space for and an addressee of the process-based encounter “in practice” during the exhibition: Together with the artist leo and the researcher, author, film maker and artist Melody Howse, Sadiq and Young continue their transdisciplinary inquiry into colonial heritage and systemic violence. In this way, “pose fatigue” creates a space of experiences in which the concepts of the autonomous work of art and an objective point of view are called into question.
