Valérie FavreActually, the Dead Are Not Dead. Politiken des Lebens28.02. - 02.08.2020
Württembergischer Kunstverien, Stuttgart

In Bergen, the two-and-a-half-year curatorial process culminated in September 2019 in the form of a nine-week exhibition. This structure will be unraveled once again in Stuttgart. In the context of three consecutive, simultaneously autonomous and interrelated exhibitions, approaches and outcomes from Bergen will be picked up on, pursued, but also realigned. The first part of the Stuttgart exhibition series focuses on life—understood beyond the alleged binary oppositions of subject and object, human and animal, health and illness, life and death. The exhibition asks how our relationships with those who are no longer or not yet present can be redefined, acknowledging our responsibility for past and future life. This might include how we tackle the legacies of unresolved social conflicts, or our concern for the future of the planet and its resources. It involves the lives of functionally diverse bodies as well as the struggle against all those economies that condone death for the sake of profit. The leitmotif here is not the resurrection, but the insurrection of bodies.

The struggle for justice and for a self-determined life requires attributes beyond the heroic or triumphant. Much rather, they are based on emancipatory practices which understand that vulnerability and self-empowerment, sorrow and joy, the dead and the living must go together. In addition to painting, graphic art, photography, and video, the exhibition includes documentations of dance, performance, and activist interventions, as well as presenting magazines and artist publications.