calendario eventi  :: 

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23/4/2014

Two exhibitions

Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe

Karin Michalski
The Alphabet of Feeling Bad
&
An Unhappy Archive
by Sabian Baumann and Karin Michalski

Atrium

Mit Beiträgen von / With contributions by:
Sara Ahmed, Sabian Baumann, Lauren Berlant, Dafne Boggeri, Elfe Brandenburger, Mel Y. Chen, Ann Cvetkovich, Jennifer Doyle, Feel Tank Chicago, Elizabeth Freeman, Jack Halberstam, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Heather Love, José Esteban Muñoz, Elspeth Probyn, Bettina Stehli & Anne Käthi Wehrli

The exhibition in the Kunstverein’s Atrium presents Karin Michalski’s video film The Alphabet of Feeling Bad and also An Unhappy Archive, a collaborative work by Michalski and Sabian Baumann. Both video and archive thematically explore the potential of personal “bad” feelings that can be experienced collectively, depathologized, and thus politicized.

The Alphabet of Feeling Bad (2012) shows an experimental interview with theorist and activist Ann Cvetkovich. Sitting on a rumpled bed, Cvetkovich talks about everyday negative feelings – such as the impression of feeling stuck at an impasse, feeling numb, being overwhelmed by demands, or not being adequate – and associates them with different meanings. The performance is based on conversations with the filmmaker Michalski. It follows the tradition of activist initiatives like the Socialist Patients’ Collective Heidelberg (SPK) of the 1970s, and the more recent Public Feelings groups in various American cities. Here, negative emotions like depression, passivity, or shame are not considered personal failure or sickness; they are rather politicized in the context of neoliberal working conditions, but also homophobia and racism. The Alphabet of Feeling Bad is based on the idea that terms might be understood as tools for enabling collectivity, thereby renegotiating the meaning of these once negatively connoted feelings through a queer-feminist approach.

An Unhappy Archive assembles texts, books, posters, drawings, and other materials that call into question the social norm of “happiness.” The name refers to theorist Sara Ahmed, who describes the “unhappy archive” as a collective, feminist-queer, and antiracist project. It not only sets out to impel criticism and resistance within society but also intends to forward the states of pleasure and utopia that are facilitated by supposed anti-figures like the feminist killjoy. The archive was initiated in 2013 by Andrea Thal at Les Complices in Zurich and is now being reactivated and expanded in a new spatial context.

Sabian Baumann lives as artist in Zurich.
Karin Michalski works as artist and film- and videoart curator in Berlin.

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Michaela Melián
IN A MIST

Curated by Nadja Quante

With her solo exhibition IN A MIST at Badischer Kunstverein, Michaela Melián is showing a new multipart work that encompasses a range of different media, including film, sound, drawing, photography, a mural, and installative elements.

The visual artist and musician approaches historical narratives and explores their cultural projections. In her works she develops multifaceted fields of memory and complex systems of reference. She transforms her precise research into spatial sculptural installations that lend visibility to social conditions.

The starting point for her new work IN A MIST is the play Fritz Bauer, which was written in 1929 by Natalia Saz and W. Selichova and premiered at the Moscow Children’s Theater. In this children’s play, the class struggle and harsh living conditions experienced by a working-class family in Germany during the late 1920s are addressed from a Soviet perspective.
The communist laborer Karl Bauer is forced to go into hiding since he is wanted by the police for being involved in the organization of a strike. His wife and child are left behind without any foundation for existence. The police resort to all means, even violence, in trying to obtain information about his hideout from his son Fritz Bauer. The play ends with the family being brought to Moscow by Russian comrades.
According to Natalia Saz, Fritz Bauer is the first play put on by the Moscow Children’s Theater aiming at the international education of children of a “middle and advanced Pioneer age.” Many of the issues raised in this theatrical piece are still pertinent today, such as precarious employment situations or unequal educational opportunities. Furthermore, the play reflects a basic conflict of the last hundred years: the antagonistic relationship between communism and capitalism.

In a collage of music, language, and images, Michaela Melián takes up representations of topics treated in this play. She disassembles individual elements and issues, shedding light on the topicality of certain thematic complexes from the play by integrating a variety of perspectives. She then forms new constellations, presented in a dynamic spatial situation in a mist of past and present.

The new film In a Mist is coproduced by Badischer Kunstverein, Münchner Kammerspiele, and Bayerischer Rundfunk / Hörspiel und Medienkunst. The audio play of the same title will be broadcasted on BR radio on 16 May at 9.05 pm.

Michaela Melián (b. 1956 in Munich) lives and works in Hamburg and Munich. She studied art and music in Munich and London and is a member of the band F.S.K. (Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle). Since 2010 Melián is professor of Time-based Media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg.

Part of:
2014 - 1914 Peace + War
22nd Festival of European Culture Karlsruhe 7 - 25 May 2014

Image: Michaela Melián, "Radioturm," 2012/2013. Thread, inket print.

Press office
presse@badischer-kunstverein.de
tel.: +49(0)721 28226

Opening: Thursday, 24 April, 7pm

Badischer Kunstverein
Waldstraße 3 - D - 76133 Karlsruhe
Opening hours:
Tuesday to Friday from 11:00 a.m. - 7:00 p.m. and
Saturday/Sunday from 11:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Admission: 3 Euro, reduced rate 1,50 Euro
(free for members)
Happy Friday:
Free admission for all visitors on Fridays from 2 to 7 pm.

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