Erratic Resistance

Curated with Simone Neuenschwander
30.05. – 03.08.2019
Opening: May 29, 2019, 6 – 9 pm

Özlem Altin, Alexandra Bircken, Hanna-Maria Hammari, Lewis Hammond, Vera Palme, Marta Riniker-Radich, Diamond Stingily, Frieda Toranzo Jaeger

With special guests :

....Johnson and Jensen's Skaldic passage to and over and indeed beyond hell itself at 8848 meters comes for all the right reasons. Damn it, boyo, through all the mayhem of necessary cannibalism, the impact comes real, and hard. And the release. Hey, these two might even survive in Space....
- Smyth's Myths c. 2145

Straight from Base Camp comes the southern debut of Colt Jonner's Desecration of Descent (BDP, 2018), read aloud by Vera Palme and Elif Saydam on the occasion of Die Marmory Show IV. 20:00 hr. English. Copies of the book will be present.

Text by Simone Neuenschwander :

… desire isn't lack, it's surplus energy –
a claustrophobia inside your skin –”
Chris Kraus, I Love Dick, 1997

Human bodies are incalculable entities, enigmatic biotopes. Dominated by a long tradition of disciplining, they are equally the scenes of action for resistance and the liberation of desire. Starting from modernity, they and their representations in art have resisted, with various manifestations, the seizures and definitions of what has been established in regard to physiognomy, gender, and health. In the history of the body, the question arises who its opponents are – political institutions, cultural history, religion, the principle of rationality – or the subject itself, which has internalized external logics, carrying them as part of its identity and its own desires? For every image of human physique and its expressed resistance, we must therefore ask ourselves from which particular context is being spoken from.

Erratic Resistance concentrates on images of contemporary corporealities that turn against the conditioning of their respective surroundings with unpredictable strategies. The body appears as an entity that changes by leaps and bounds and withdraws from a classifying visibility through both erratic concealment and disclosure. In the search for protection, well-being and comfort, the appearing figurations concurrently demand emancipation and self-determination. Clearly aware of the advantages and disadvantages of technical acceleration and its claim to optimization, they oppose economic objectification, statistical norms, and gender classifications.

In subversive battles, placeholders and substitutes of the body are used to gain direct power to act upon presupposed inscriptions. Fetishized coverings, sports devices and anthropomorphic transformations become autonomous codes that make a self-empowering politic of corporeality readable in volatile figures and materials. Solidified identifications of how bodies are expected to act and to desire are eroded by means of affective, unruly and irrational gestures.

In Erratic Resistance, the works employ asymmetrical movements to constantly resist hierarchical verifications of human corporealities and the web of dependencies in which they are entangled to date.

DEBORAH SCHAMONI
Mauerkircherstr. 186
81925 Munich
Germany