KINDL presents The New Subject. Mutating Rights and Conditions of Living Bodies from September 15, 2024 to January 26, 2025. In the face of increasing state control in many parts of the world – be it through the dismantling of hard-won reproductive rights or the erosion of LGBTQ+ rights – the discourse around the human body as a politically charged terrain seems more urgent than ever. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to light and publicly discussed a profound change in the relationship between the individual and their body and the associated systemic inequalities and injustices. The current military conflicts show a clear hierarchy between expendable bodies and those that prove useful for territorial and military purposes. The Cameroonian historian and philosopher Achille Mbembe argues that modern control societies are based on the “production of a new subject”, a new type of human made up of physical, artificial and neurobiological parts that are much easier to manipulate and control.
Image above: Clara Sika Helbo, Uncovering an Iceberg, 2023, Research material, Photo: Clara Sika Helbo, 2022
The multi-year interdisciplinary research and exhibition project The New Subject is a series of interrelated exhibitions and public events. The artistic works assembled in the exhibition series shed light on the body as a contested site of ideological and political power games, explore modes of existence that attempt to evade state constraints and discuss strategies of resistance. They examine the human body in the context of global biopolitics and technological developments, shedding light on state control mechanisms and their legal, body-related and cognitive effects.
The exhibition at KINDL is the fourth presentation of the project and brings together 15 artists and collectives who approach body- and politics-related topics in various artistic media. The exhibition is divided into four areas that overlap and complement each other. It begins with the field of the state, military power apparatus, which classifies lives based on ethnicity, gender and social status and treats bodies as capital that can be consumed and exchanged. The exhibition also examines how new technologies expand the capabilities and boundaries of the body, while at the same time increasing control over it. In this way, new technologies can overcome gender and age barriers and revolutionize healthcare, while at the same time contributing to a hardening of existing hierarchies. Other positions within the project deal with the physical dimension of resistance and the violence that bodies experience through social expectations, but also through legal and state measures. The body can function both as a site of injustice and oppression and as an active means of resistance and emancipation. Finally, normativity, conventionality and the deviation from physical and mental standards are examined. The selected works propose to understand our understanding of the body as an interplay of physical, emotional and spiritual experiences in order to expand its possibilities for action.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a discourse program, including a symposium on 23 November 2024.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication by Distanz-Verlag, edited by Anna Bitkina & Maria Veits / TOK and Kathrin Becker.
The project was initiated by the curatorial collective TOK and will be realized between 2023 and 2025 in close collaboration with four European art institutions: Konsthall C (Sweden), Kunsthal NORD (Denmark), Oksasenkatu 11 (Finland) and KINDL – Center for Contemporary Art (Germany).
Artists: Oshin Siao Bhatt, Yevgeniy Fiks, Tore Hallas, Tirdad Hashemi & Soufia Erfanian & Mahsa Saloor, Clara Sika Helbo, Saodat Ismailova, Kyuri Jeon, Aziza Kadyri, Flo Kasearu, Björn Larsson & Carl Johan Erikson, Albina Mokhryakova, Adina Pintilie, Ajla R. Steinvåg, Anna Tereshkina, Anna Uddenberg.
Funded by the Federal Cultural Foundation, by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.
As part of the Berlin Art Week 2024
Curators: The Creative Association of Curators TOK (Anna Bitkina & Maria Veits, tokcurators.art)
Symposium
Contested Bodies: Navigating Control, Resistance, and Technological Impacts
Saturday, 23.11.2024, 12 – 5 p.m.
With a keynote by Micha Frazer-Carroll (author and researcher), talks with Anna Uddenberg (artist, Berlin), Anan Fries (artist, Berlin), Ulrika Flink (curator, Stockholm), Clara Sika Helbo (artist and designer, Copenhagen) and a performative reading of a text by Yevgeniy Fiks (artist, New York). Moderated by the curators Anna Bitkina and Maria Veits.
In English language
Free admission
WHEN?
Opening: Saturday14. September, 6 – 9 p.m.
Exhibition dates: Sunday, September 15, 2024 – Sunday, January 26, 2025
Opening hours: Wednesday, 12 – 8 pm, Thursday – Sunday, 12 – 6 pm
WHERE?
KINDL – Center for Contemporary Art
Am Sudhaus 3
12053 Berlin
COST?
YOU for KINDL: 10 EUR
KINDL for YOU: 7 EUR
Reduced admission: 4 EUR
Under 18 years: Free admission
