Political Affairs - Language Is Not Innocent / Cana Bilir-Meier: Düşler Ülkesi

Artist talk: May 18, 3–4pm
With a.o. Monica Bonvicini & Sam Durant 

Panel: May 22, 7–8pm
With Cana Bilir-Meier, Ibrahim Arslan, Hannah Peaceman, Vincent Bababoutilabo, Moderation: Chana Dischereit 

Artist talk: May 28, 7am–8pm
With Monica Bonvicini, Bettina Steinbrügge & Jason Dodge 

Artist talk and book presentation: July 19, 7–8pm
With Cana Bilir-Meier & Tobias Peper 

The Kunstverein in Hamburg is delighted to present the group exhibition Political Affairs - Language Is Not Innocent and the solo exhibition Düşler Ülkesi by Cana Bilir-Meier. We cordially invite you to our opening on May 17, 7pm.

Political Affairs
Language Is Not Innocent
With Karo Akpokiere, Art & Language, Alice Attie, Monica Bonvicini, Andrea Bowers, George Brecht, Daniela Comani, Guy Debord, Jeremy Deller, Willie Doherty, Sam Durant, Elmgren & Dragset, Öyvind Fahlström, Claire Fontaine, Jakob Kolding, Barbara Kruger, Aleksandra Mir, Adrian Piper, Pope.L, Chris Reinecke, Allen Ruppersberg, Maruša Sagadin, Superflex, Ron Terada und Poet Ai, read by Donika Kelly

The group exhibition Political Affairs—Language Is Not Innocent surveys how contemporary artists use critical language in their creative works. The exhibition understands artistic practice as the re-working of visual forms and methods clarifying how opinions are constructed, reproduced, and manipulated through written words. If the artwork disconnects texts from their original, visual context, alternative ways of reading historical, social, and political moments are enabled. Such acts of copying and re-contextualization are strong gestures with political implications and can provide an impetus for transforming the world and behavior.

The show brings together heterogeneous ways of understanding and deals with political art from different generations in an exhibition context that mirrors without dissolving the complexity behind the formation of political and social opinion. One of the strengths of contemporary art is how it allows to consider the world from different perspectives. It raises questions. And language-based artworks in particular communicate directly in many cases and share an affective resonance. Artists in the exhibition strategically display the use of production methods and conditions that are already political in themselves while incorporating the language of politics and mass media, cinema and literature in their artworks They expose the conventions, stereotypes, behavioral patterns, habitual opinions, and taboos to which society is bound.

The exhibition is kindly supported by the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, Hubertus Wald Stiftung and Zeit-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius.

Cana Bilir-Meier
Düşler Ülkesi

Cana Bilir-Meier (*1986 in Munich, lives and works in Vienna and Munich) deals with questions of social, cultural, emotional and structural participation as well as equality of migrants and non-migrants. For this, she uses a range of media such as film, drawing, performance or audio. She questions access to knowledge production in our society in order to open it up to more people—while doing so, she focuses specifically on cooperation with others. Bilir-Meier is particularly interested in unstated or hidden (hi)stories of migrant realities which she tracks down in private and public archives. One of these stories is about the writer and poet Semra Ertan, Bilir-Meier’s aunt. Born in Turkey in 1956, Ertan moved to Germany to her parents in 1972. In 1982, Ertan set herself publicly on fire in Hamburg as a sign against the increasing racism in the country. The artist has carefully taken up this personal family history in a film in order to locate Ertan’s experiences as part of a collective memory and history. In addition to this work, Düşler Ülkesi shows a selection of Bilir-Meier’s previous work and is supplemented by a new production.

Together with anti-racist initiatives and institutions in Hamburg, a comprehensive framework program on the Society of the Many has been developed. The artist’s first monograph will accompany the exhibition.

The exhibition is kindly supported by the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, Stiftung Kunstfonds, and the Hamburgische Kulturstiftung.