Things we sense about each other

Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Irina Afanasyeva, Vahram Aghasyan, Lala Aliyeva, Stefan Bertalan, Anna Dasović, Ines Doujak, Ilkin Huseynov, Anna Jermolaewa, Adela Jušić, Susanne Kriemann, Misha Kurilov, Elturan Mammadov, Ekaterina Muromtseva, Jura Shust, Harout Simonian, Lucine Talalyan, Aleksei Taruts, Iulia Toma, Miloš Trakilović, ZIP Group

The Badische Kunstverein serves as the hub of a wide-ranging exhibition, research, and events project that focuses on images and counterimages of Europe. The exhibition Things we sense about each other features 21 international artists, and is realized collectively by a group of curators from Baku, Bucharest, Karlsruhe, Kiev, Krasnodar, Minsk, Poltava, Prague, Sarajevo, Vienna, and Yerevan. The second chapter of the project is a travelling academy planned under the title Things we share with each other. The academy will start in June 2021 and will be located in various cities of the collaborators. The project is initiated in close cooperation with tranzit.at from Vienna; it is designed as a trans-European network and an invitation for a long-term dialogue.

The exhibition showcases artistic works that critically address divergent perspectives of an emancipatory and democratically conceived Europe, something that is being called into question along the margins (but also at the center) to an increasing degree. The artists explore the significance of objects or things which—depending on who interprets them, who claims them, and who resists their putative meaningsΩ–are the bearers of divergent and often antagonistic attributions of identity. With the rhetoric of inclusion and exclusion—in conjunction with the displacements and distortions of ecologies and economies, an increasingly nationalist politics of identity, technological upheaval, and the massive transformation of the shared lifeworld—threatening to tear European societies apart, objects often serve as substitutes for fundamental assumptions about the “Other.”

Integrated into the exhibition alongside the art projects will be a number of such conflictual objects themselves, which symbolize diverse ideas and visions of Europe from various political, cultural, and social perspectives. Whether everyday objects, political symbols, texts, or cryptograms, these semantically charged things act as antagonistic but also mediating and conciliatory artifacts in a dialogue between a multiplicity of European societal and cultural constellations. In many instances, they confront us as shape-shifters that are detached from any single horizon of negotiation, but whose significance evolve perpetually. The participating artists expose the problematical status of these things in full view, at the same time investigating the transformative potential of a history that is embodied in objects. What allows a specific object to function as a representation of a specific cultural complex? What does its materiality reveal? How and to what degree do discourse about and classifications of this materiality color our perceptions?

Planned as the project’s second chapter, and to be launched in June of 2021, is a traveling academy, conceived as a non-hierarchical research group, to be based temporarily in Karlsruhe, Germany, and located subsequently in the different countries associated with the project. Both exhibition and academy are conceived as a democratic platform designed to join local and international networks with one another in dialogue, to initiate long-term communities, and to explore possible forms of a transnational European society.

The exhibition is being curated and organized by: Larissa Agel, Damir Arsenijevic, Anja Casser, Yvonne Fomferra, Leyli Gafarova, Michaela Geboltsberger, Veronika Janatková, Anna Karpenko, Eva Khachatryan, Serhiy Klymko, Georg Schöllhammer, Raluca Voinea, ZIP Group

A project of tranzit.at and Badischer Kunstverein.

Things we sense about each other takes place in the context of the 25th European Culture Days 2021 in Karlsruhe, Germany.

A graphic novel and a special issue of the magazine springerin will accompany the exhibition.

For more information on the exhibitions, further collaborations, and our program, please visit us on our website, on Instagram and Facebook.