Michael Dreyer: Gemeinschaftsarbeiten / Society Pieces / Elke Marhöfer & Mikhail Lylov: Quantum Attentiveness

Michael Dreyer: Gemeinschaftsarbeiten / Society Pieces
Gemeinschaftsarbeiten / Society Pieces is the Stuttgart–based artist Michael Dreyer’s most comprehensive solo exhibition to date. The exhibition involves a (formal) confrontation with various languages and aesthetics of political and so-called “committed” art. According to Dreyer, political art can be characterized as a “demonstrational” speech act, one that was still characterized in the 19th and 20th centuries by conviction, still communicated truths, exposed discourses of power, and shaped values. The approximately 50 new works in this exhibition are preoccupied with a dialectic of social utopia and defective reality. Drawings alternate with collages and small-scale sculptures. At the center are multicolored ink drawings that form a series of monumental book titles. They represent a subcanon of literature and theory devoted to themes such as community and society, relief and self-help, production and productivity, automation and destruction. This putatively simple pictorial language asserts itself in relation to other motifs as well, with gear wheels, eggs, and chicks referring allegorically to a utopia of “edenic animal coexistence” and by extension to a form of animal-machine peace. These motifs bring Dreyer in proximity to kitsch and clichés, but at the same time allow him to negotiate the possibility of realizing ideas of harmony and crisis pictorially.

A social utopia on the threshold leading from the 19th to the 20th centuries was the “aid” addressed in the exhibition in its various facets. Here, the child as constitutively “in need of aid” is the subject of numerous works, for example the sculptures Child Destroying a Music Box (2016), Child Pointing With a Crutch (2016) and Frères et soeurs, s’imitant mutuellement (2017). In the new collages Dreyer has established that the subjective and autobiographical moment contained in the works of various authors can be elucidated quite concretely through the performative gesture of their self-staging. At the same time, collage and montage are interrogated as traditional media of critique in modernism.

Against the background of the current crisis of humanity, democracy, and participation, Michael Dreyer addresses the question of how community can be negotiated in a utopian way, how individuals can support one another within a community, and what role ought to be attributed to political art in this context. In his reflections on the vocabularies, iconographies, and references of “committed art” he draws upon the various forms of their actual miscarriage. The crisis of political art can be traced to the moment when the field places itself at the service of high culture.

Elke Marhöfer & Mikhail Lylov: Quantum Attentiveness
Elke Marhöfer and Mikhail Lylov’s exhibition reflects their interest in the interplay between human and nonhuman protagonists and the evolving concept of ecology. The title of the show hints at the ideas of the physicist and philosopher Karen Barad, who has developed an ethically motivated method for attentively observing interconnections between animate and inanimate matter. Marhöfer and Lylov’s works too are concerned with categorical relationships and differences in nature, culture, and science.

The largest exhibition in Germany to date of works by Elke Marhöfer and Mikhail Lylov revolves around two current films as well as a number of space-structuring objects. The film Shape Shifting (2015) deals with the productive interaction between humans, plants, animals, and the elements in the Japanese “satoyama” landscape. In the film Nobody knows when it was made and why (2015), the affective impact of images and their interrelationship are investigated with reference to Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas. Marhöfer and Lylov also conceive of their works as effective and productive tools. The exhibition itself becomes, not least through the installation Wall Cloud (2017), a territory into which the artworks interfere, both spatially and temporally. In their works, Marhöfer and Lylov wish to decentre the perspective of the Anthropocene, characterized by a belief in the exceptional role of humanity.

Talks & events

Friday, May 19, 6pm

Artist talk with Elke Marhöfer & Mikhail Lylov
moderated by Didem Yazici (in English)

Tuesday, June 27, 5–11pm
Film screening / Bar / Discussion / Music
conversation with Michael Dreyer and Anja Casser
with guest Peter Ott (in German)

For more information please visit: www.badischer-kunstverein.de