Kunsthalle Münster shows from Saturday, 4 May 2024 the exhibition forms of the surrounding futures by the artists Rodrigo Hernandez, Agnė Jokšė, Tarik Kiswanson, Esse McChesney, Rasmus Myrup, Ania Nowak, Luiz Roque and Ana Vaz. forms of the surrounding futures responds to the current state of permanent crisis by embodying and celebrating plural narratives beyond a normative dominance for a to-morrow in the exhibited works and the performances. In doing so, the exhibition bypasses prevailing paradigms that uphold the status quo and anticipate possible futures to conceive of our present time as a moment of transformation full of potentiality. An expanded notion of “queer” forms the starting point to question prevailing paradigms and power structures and to rethink and reshape the construction of bodies, spaces, and times.
Image above: Luiz Roque, S (Still), 2017. Courtesy the artist und Mendes Wood DM São Paulo, Brüssel, New York
With the adaptation of the GIBCA 2023 (Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art) Kunsthalle Münster takes up the works of international artists Rodrigo Hernandez, Agnė Jokšė, Tarik Kiswanson, Esse McChesney, Rasmus Myrup, Ania Nowak, Luiz Roque, Ana Vaz as narratives that harness the collective capacity to imagine and rehearse future worlds: Dreams, community-building practices, vulnerability, and desire serve as starting points for reinventing the potential as well as the limits of bodies and language. Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the crucial activity of feminists, LGBTQ+ and racialized voices had an unparalleled place in dismantling longstanding structures of inequality, manifesting as beacons of alternative scenarios. Change regularly emerges via the struggles of the oppressed. Sexualized and racialized others have been imposed a proximity to critical situations that place them at the forefront of social dissent. Their aim to dismantle dominant structures entails an intersectional struggle for equal and nonconforming forms of existence, one that echoes the mutually dependent and entangled life systems on the planet.
Forging an alliance of others, forms of the surrounding futures addresses shared urgent needs, celebrating plural narratives for tomorrow. It endorses the views of geographer Natalie Oswin: queer proposes a challenge of the norm by ‘operating beyond powers and controls that enforce normativity’, entailing ’radical (re)thinkings, (re)drawings, (re)conceptualisations, (re)mappings that could (re)make bodies, spaces and geographies’ (Natalie Oswin, Critical Geographies And The Uses Of Sexuality: Deconstructing Queer Space, 2008). In such an expanded understanding, queer becomes visible as a collective, emancipative position that includes racialized, sexualized and naturalized others and places them in non-normative proximity to one another, so that the constructed nature of the present becomes just as visible as the emergence of multiple futures.
Foto: Jhoeko / Courtesy 1646
Curators:
João Laia is the Artistic Director of the Contemporary Art Department of the Municipality of Porto in Portugal. From 2019 to 2024 he was chief curator at Kiasma—National Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, and curator of the 12th edition of GIBCA—Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, which took place in 2023 around the city of Gothenburg, Sweden. Together with Valentinas Klimašauskas, Laia curated the 14th edition of the Baltic Triennial, titled The Endless Frontier, at the CAC—Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, in 2021. Laia and Klimašauskas team up again to present the artist duo Pakui Hardware at the Lithuanian National Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024. Previous projects were presented in institutions such as Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; La Casa Encendida, Madrid; MACBA—Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona; MAAT—Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Lisbon; Moscow Young Art Biennial, MMOMA, Moscow; Whitechapel Gallery, London; and the Contemporary Art Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil, São Paulo. Laia has a background in social sciences, film theory and contemporary art. Among other publications, he edited Living Encounters with Kiasma/Mousse, in 2022, and A Multiple Community, with Sesc, in 2018 and published in magazines such as Art Monthly, Flash Art, frieze, Mousse, Spike and Terremoto. Working with exhibitions, film screenings as well as performance and public programmes, Laia has regularly worked with artistic practices from different generations, media and geographies that have sought to expand traditional formats, questioning established histories and experimenting alternative narratives.
Merle Radtke is an art historian and works as a curator and a writer. Since July 2018 she has been director of Kunsthalle Münster. Previously, she worked as a curator for Hamburger Kunsthalle, Jürgen Becker Galerie, and Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, among others. From 2015 to 2017, she was a member of the Aesthetics of the Virtual graduate programme at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg (HFBK Hamburg), followed by a residency at Villa Kamogawa / Goethe Institute Kyoto, Japan in 2018. She regularly publishes texts on contemporary art and culture. Her work focuses on feminist art, historiography, art and the public, the practice and theory of the Internet, (post-)digital art practice, and the interconnection between original, replica and simulation. On a regular basis, she publishes texts on contemporary art and culture. At Kunsthalle Münster she realized exhibitions and projects with Mary Beth Edelson, Christiane Blattmann, Adrian Williams, Katia Kameli, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Mikołaj Sobczak, Pedro Barateiro, and Dominique White. Additionally, she is responsible for the Public Collection of the city of Münster with works by artists like Daniel Buren, Rebecca Horn, Maria Nordmann, Claes Oldenburg, Gerhard Richter, Oscar Tuazon, and Silke Wagner. Since 2020, she is the head of the residency programme Residence NRW⁺, a programme for emerging artist and curators, which is affiliated to Kunsthalle Münster.
WHEN?
Opening: Friday, 03. May 2024
at 6 pm – Opening
at 7:30 pm – Ania Nowak, To the Aching Parts (Manifesto)! (Performance)
Accompanying programme:
Saturday, 04. May 2024, at 2 pm: Artist talk with Rodrigo Hernandez (DE), at 3 pm: Rasmus Myrup, The Völva’s Live Déjà Vu (Performance)
Sunday, 23. June 2024, at 3 pm: Guided tour with Jolanda Saal
Thursday, 18. July 2024, at 6 pm: Guided tour with Jolanda Saal
Thursday, 04. August 2024, at 3 pm: Director’s tour with Merle Radtke, at 4:30 pm: Rasmus Myrup, The Völva’s Live Déjà Vu (Performance)
Exhibition period:
Saturday, 04. May until Thursday, 04. August 2024
Opening hours:
Tue – Sun, noon to 6 pm
WHERE?
Kunsthalle Münster
Hafenweg 28
48155 Münster
