Antje Majewski
The World of Gimel. How to Make Objects Talk
1 October 2011–15 January 2012
Opening:
1 October 2011, 11am
Lendkai 1, 8020 Graz, Austria
Opening hours:
Tues–Sun, 10am–6pm
Guided tours in German:
Tues–Fri 2pm; Sat, Sun, holidays 11am & 4pm
Guided tour in English: Sat 2pm
T +43 316/8017-9200
kunsthausgraz [at] museum-joanneum.at
Curators:
Adam Budak, Antje Majewski
Exhibition architecture:
Mésarchitecture (Didier Faustino with Isabelle Daëron)
Kunsthaus Graz celebrates Universalmuseum Joanneum Bicentenary Jubilee with an exhibition project, which explores the objects’ secret lives and magic. A matrix of life, nature and the cosmos, Antje Majewski’s World of Gimel is the artist’s own private universal museum-in-a-nutshell, featuring a septet of objects: a clay teapot in the form of a human hand, a shell, a pot made of fragrant moroccan wood that contains a black ball or two glass eyes, a Buddha-hand, a hedgeapple, a white stone, a meteorite—acquired by Majewski during her numerous travels and encounters. The World of Gimel—a hybrid of Aleph and Babel, of fantasy and scientific knowledge—is a language laboratory, a structure en abîme, Majewski’s unique venture into the universe of things and their other identity.
Realized within the pavilion-like architectural structure that combines painting, video, installation and a book, Majewski’s project considers a variety of museum’s patterns, including the museum as a place of magical practices (such as, amongst others, a self-reassertion in regards of the current order of things), or the museum as a site of disrupture and cultural displacement, concerning other orders and the use of things. Systems of classifications and systematizations are revisited through an almost hallucinatory process of questioning and question-posing, regarding the objects’ ontologie(s): If we multiply the stories around an object, will we thus reveal the object’s thingness in the center? Is it possible to grow inanimate things in your garden? Could we replace all inanimate art objects by one living object? Is there really a difference between inanimate and animate objects? Can objects speak? Does all matter think? Can we create objects that connect their thinking with ours?
The exhibition is accompanied by the following events:
Lecture by Chantal Mouffe
Cosmopolitanism, Agonistic Politics and Artistic Practices
30.09.2011, 7:30 pm
Good Morning in the World of Gimel! Breakfast and Performative Lecture by Antje Majewski with the contributions from other artists of the exhibition
01.10.2011, 9:30am
Performance by Mathilde Rosier
Cruising on the Deck
01.10.2011, 12:00 pm
Lecture by Marcus Steinweg
What is an Object?
01.12.2011, 7:00 pm
My Own Private Cinema: Alejandro Jodorowsky
El Topo / The Holy Mountain
18.10.2011, 6.00 pm
My Own Private Cinema: Djibril Diop-Mambéty
Touki Bouki / Die kleine Verkäuferin der Sonne / Das Los
13.12.2011, 6:00 pm
The alternative audioguide for the exhibition has been composed and performed by experimental musician and writer Momus.
The exhibition’s catalogue is published in English and German at Sternberg Press and it includes texts by Adam Budak, Clementine Deliss, Patrick Komorowski, Antje Majewski, Ingo Niermann, Peter Pakesch, Xu Shuxian, Marcus Steinweg, as well as transcripts of conversations with mit Issa Samb, El Hadji Sy, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Thomas and Helke Bayrle and reprints by Jorge Luis Borges, Friedrich Hölderlin, Chuang-tzu and John Joseph Mathews. The catalogue includes a DVD with films by Antje Majewski as well as postcards with installation views.
*Image above:
Courtesy of neugerriemschneider and Antje Majewski.
Photo: Jens Ziehe, Berlin.
