Eva Barto: The Supporters / Ramaya Tegegne: Unusability Might be Assumed Unless there are Signs Indicating Otherwise

Eva Barto
The Supporters

Eva Barto’s exhibition at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart reconsiders the legal-economic infrastructure by which financial giving is managed in the art sector. Rather than solely reflect on the transactional structures of monetary gifts, financial support, and philanthropy at large, Barto’s exhibition actualizes a specific set of grantor-grantee, donor-donee, and sponsor-sponsee relations. The transactional order for these relations and effects are governed through a system of distinct contractual agreements, which the artist conceptualized and implemented within the material and temporal dimensions of her exhibition. For Barto, to produce disclosures on financial giving and reciprocal compensation in the field of art today is to challenge the idealization of independence by emphasizing the messy, enmeshed, and consequential dependencies that define working relations and conditions.   

Ramaya Tegegne
Unusability Might be Assumed Unless there are Signs Indicating Otherwise

Ramaya Tegegne’s exhibition at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart centers around the artist’s experiential research into the conflicting role art institutions maintain when they promote claims to anti-racism while actively engaging in the management of racial inequalities. It is this violent disconnect between a declarative politics and lived political realities that Tegegne recognizes as being particularly pervasive in the arts sector. This disconnect is amplified today by a social uprising that extends from the racial equity demands of individual access and representation to transforming race relations at the systemic level of shared policy and institutional governance. While considering the extent to which racially specific elision and dispossession continue to define the operative structures of art institutions, Tegegne’s exhibition focuses on modes of direct address and confrontational action that respond to these deeply entrenched ongoing historical conditions. 
 

For further information, including accessibility policies, a schedule of related programming, full exhibition texts and press materials, please see the webpage or contact the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart office here with inquiries.