Faculty of Invisibility:
Assembly
10 July – 8 August 2010
Rote Fabrik, Seestrasse 395
8038 Zürich, Switzerland
Curated by Sönke Hallmann, Inga Zimprich
EXHIBITION
In its curatorial guest project the Faculty of Invisibility engages with the political place of the assembly. Along moments of institutionalisation it traces the question which possibilities of assembly the contemporary art institution suggests and allows for. The Faculty of Invisibility proceeds by investigating forms of political speech, moments of inscription and acts of enforcement that make social articulations binding and recognizable. If the institution marks the threshold where articulations are inscribed into the realm of the visible and communicable, to question the institution’s political capacity today requires to exercise the institutional as a function of speech and to assemble within its mechanisms of showing and issuing.
The exhibition room conveys a series of settings similar to those that direct roles and spaces of speech in institutional entities. These spatial set-ups draw on such acts as the address, the foundation, the protocol, the delegation and the declaration to ask: What does it mean to gather within the language-based apparatus of the institution –– within those places the institution provides, but which in turn reproduce the institutional itself? What can it mean to gain articulation in them, to have a voice within them? How could one open a space of speech inside the institutional realm in which one’s own being-in-language becomes apparent and available?
Within this exhibition materials from archives of political entities are on display such as the United Nations, the Central Round Table of the GDR, personal peace-treaties of the GDR’s oppositional movement (both from the Robert Havemann Gesellschaft), the founding congress of the West-German Greens (from the Archiv Grünes Gedächtnis der Heinrich Böll Stiftung), records of meetings of Zürich’s city council as well as of the Shedhalle itself. In the video piece Staging Cities / Cuidades en Escena, M7red (Mauricio Corberlan, Pio Torroja, AR) develop a scenario of negotiation between human and non-human actors.
EVENTS
16/17/18 July, daily 8pm
Like the exhibition, the series of public events examines formats of assembly. The Faculty of Invisibility convenes with Benjamin Cölle (cultural theorist and filmmaker, DE), Laurie Cohen (historian, AT), Maaike Engelen (psychotherapist, UK), Jeanne van Heeswijk (artist, NL), Ingela Johansson (artist, SE), Dagmar Reichert (researcher, CH), Darren Rhymes (artist, UK), Johan Siebers (philosopher, UK) et al to address institutional experiences within the different work fields of the participants.
23/24 July, 2 – 8pm
Based on her artistic and auto-biographical research into the events of 1989/1990 in East Germany, Elske Rosenfeld (artist and author, DE) develops a public workshop that uses the transcripts of the Central Round Table of the GDR to discuss the specific moments of founding, legitimation, institutionalization and delegation from the history of this short-lived political institution.
30/31 July, 1 August, 2 – 6pm
(participation also online at www.reading.department.cc)
The Department of Reading follows traces of text and image emerging in this exhibition project. It questions the production of images of the discursive and it works along lines of concepts of mass and movement. With Helmut Draxler (theoretician and curator, DE, tbc), Achim Lengerer (artist, DE), p-r-o-x-y (CH), Jan Rolletschek (theoretician, DE), Johan Siebers (philosopher, UK) und Tanja Widmann (artist, AT).
7 August, 4pm
A questionnaire issued as part of the correspondence of Shedhalle in 1991 discussing the institutions conceptual and curatorial re-orientation forms the center of a concluding conversation with guests, adressing the political capacity of the art institution today. Further details of the event will be announced shortly at www.shedhalle.ch.
In addition to the exhibition display developed by the Faculty of Invisibility, designers Maartje Dros and Francois Lombarts create temporary shelters for guests in Shedhalle.
The exhibition project Faculty of Invisibility: Assembly is made possible with the kind support of Präsidialdepartement der Stadt Zürich, Bundesamt für Kultur, Migros Kulturprozent, Appenzeller Bier, Mineralquelle Gontenbad, Delinat, Het Blauwe Huis.
For more information please contact Inga Zimprich on ingazimprich@gmail.com or visit www.shedhalle.ch and www.faculty.cc
Shedhalle
Rote Fabrik, Seestrasse 395
8038 Zürich, Switzerland
Tel ++41/44/4815950
Fax ++41/44/4815951
Email info@shedhalle.ch
www.shedhalle.ch
Opening Hours
Wed – Sun 1 – 6pm
Opening 9 July, 7pm with Clemence Freschard in concert
