Fall-Winter 2020 program

Current and forthcoming at ar/ge kunst, Kunstverein of Bolzano/Bozen: two exhibitions, a public program, the fifth edition of the One Year-Long Research Project and the launch of Hostile Environment(s), a platform and symposium. With new commissions, collaborations and productions, this program brings together diverse but resonating practices, supporting long-term projects by emerging and mid-career artists and researchers.

Brutal Family Roots
Mohamed Bourouissa
September 17–November 14, 2020

Mohamed Bourouissa’s solo exhibition pays homage to the psychiatrist, political philosopher and revolutionary Frantz Fanon and to his complex relationship with the city of Blida, Algeria, where the artist was born. Fanon’s contribution to the anti-colonial struggle and his deep analysis of the mechanisms of oppression and racism are articulated in different ways by the two installations that comprise Brutal Family Roots. Incomplete Herbarium (2020) and The Whispering of Ghosts (2018–20) both evidence Bourouissa’s unflinching attitude toward history and his bold approach to establishing collaborations and forms of dialogue with all kinds of subjectivities.

Hostile Environment(s) – Designing Hostility, Building Refugia 
October 2020–May 2021
Edited by Silvia Franceschini, Roberto Gigliotti, Emanuele Guidi, Lorenzo Pezzani.

Keynote conversations (via Zoom)
October 23, 2020, 6pm C.E.T.: Françoise Vergès
October 29, 2020, 6pm C.E.T.: Juanita Sundberg

Hostile Environment(s) – Designing Hostility, Building Refugia is an expanded symposium and online platform that investigates the political ecology of migration and borderland violence. In a series of online and in-person events it will unravel the ways in which surveillance technologies, the strategic mobilization of legal geographies, bureaucratic protocols and extractive practices have conjured up a generalized atmosphere of hostility against those classified as outsiders, weaponizing “natural” borderlands as well as urban geographies across and beyond Europe. Over the next six months the symposium will feature various formats, asking what forms of radical hospitality and sanctuary might still exist when spaces of refuge are being destroyed.

Conceived as a continuation of architect and researcher Lorenzo Pezzani’s One Year-Long Research Project (2018-2021), it is a collaboration with the Free University of Bozen/Bolzano – Faculty of Design and Art and Z33 – House of Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture, Hasselt.  

Abeyance and Concurrence
Jessika Khazrik for The Society of False Witnesses
November 27, 2020–February 13, 2021

Jessika Khazrik explores the complex links between ecocide as armament and banking as statecraft through a new iteration of the Blue Barrel Grove (2013–ongoing), a project that began with an investigation of a secret trade of toxic waste sent from Italy to Lebanon and partially dumped next to Khazrik’s house. Revisiting this project in light of recent experience of dispossession, arrest and collapse, Khazrik creates an indisciplinary probe that dynamically apposes the structural fault lines of international law with the colossal eruption of slow violence and the concurrent search for transformative justice through collective disruption.

One Year-Long Research Project, Fifth Edition
Katrin Hornek
2020–2022
Commissioned in conjunction with BAU

Austrian artist and researcher Katrin Hornek has been invited for the One Year-Long Research Project. Hornek’s ongoing investigation of biosphere-technosphere metabolisms and the “act of breathing” confronts the history of Sinigo, a suburb of Merano where Mussolini built Europe’s second largest ammonia factory in order to produce fertilizer as part of his so-called Italian self-sufficiency program and the industrialization of the South Tyrol.

Public Program
Curated by BAU

Articulated in both practice-based and theory driven formats, the public program conceived by BAU sets in motion a variety of expertise, establishing reciprocity and proximity between the regional and international forms of knowledge presented in the exhibitions.

The program at ar/ge kunst is curated by its artistic director Emanuele Guidi.

The program is made possible by the Autonomous Province of South Tyrol, Department of Culture; Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio; City of Bolzano; Autonomous Region of Trentino–Alto Adige. Mohamed Bourouissa’s exhibition is supported by Fondazione Nuovi Mecenati – Fondazione franco-italiana di sostegno alla creazione contemporanea. Special thanks to our sponsor Dr. Schär.