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Swinger

Kerstin Honeit und
Pätzug / Hertweck

Opening

05/18/2018 at 7pm

Welcome
Dr. Ute Müller-Tischler
Head of Department Arts and Culture

Introduction to the exhibition
by the visiting curators
Stefan Aue, Anne Hölck and Jessica Páez

Duration of the exhibition
05/19/2018 – 07/01/2018

Accompanying program

Sun 06/10/2018
Curatorial tour through the exhibition

Fri 06/29/2018, 7pm
Finissage with Lecture Performance by Prof. Dr. Stefanie Wenner and music by Frinda di Lanco

The architecture of the Bärenzwinger constructs a specific reality: Movements and encounters between bears and humans were regulated through perfect mechanisms: Security grating systems determined the animals’ path, and keepers would operate them, thus maintaining the scenery in the

outdoor enclosures for the visitors’ view.

Today, these systems form the backdrop for another staging of movement and a new choreography of encounter.

To what extent does architecture structure the relationship between humans, animals and objects? How is behavior shaped by spacial structures, and how can these established conditions be disrupted and re-negotiated?

In the exhibition “Swinger”, former demarcations are revised. The mechanically animated installation “Pagodenwackeln” by Pätzug / Hertweck moves throughout the interior and exterior of the Bärenzwinger and challenges a positioning in relation to the space and its voids.

In Kerstin Honeit’s Video work “Panda Moonwalk or Why Meng Meng Walks Backwards”, human and inhuman bodies actively and resistantly assert themselves in the context of social injustices.

The works touch, overlap, interrupt each other and outline modifiable structures, so that the Bärenzwinger’s construction of eality collapses and can be re-interpreted in a never-completing loop.

Curated by Stefan Aue, Anne Hölck and Jessica Páez

Kerstin Honeit

Using video works, performance and installations in her artistic research, Kerstin Honeit examines worlds of hegemonic image production in the media of information technology and pop culture. Intervening at the boundaries of representation and reception, she questions the construction of social norms.

Pätzug / Hertweck

Irene Pätzug and Valentin Hertweck have been collaborating since 2012 on largescale installations that employ kinetic elements to address space as a medium.

Their work interrogates the relationship between space and human, their collaborative practice is rooted in the conception that space itself is an actant, and not only the humans populating it. Their work evolves from an intensive engagement with the given architectural conditions of the exhibition space and transforms it into a backdrop, stage or display in combination with movement, action and reaction.

Visiting Curators

We are excited to have Stefan Aue, Anne Hölck and Jessica Páez as visiting curators for the fifth exhibition project at Bärenzwinger.

Stefan Aue concieves and realizes thematic projects between science and art, currently he works at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin. Anne Hölck is an independent scenographer for theatre projects and curator in the field of human-animal studies. Jessica Páez is an independent producer and dramaturg in theatre and visual art and works as a project coordinator at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) since 2015. Their common interest in the artistic production of knowledge and its presentation combines them as curatorial team.

Lecture Performance

Friday, 06/29/18, 7pm

Finissage of the exhibition ›Swinger‹

with Lecture Performance
by Prof. Dr. Stefanie Wenner


and afterwards music
by Frinda di Lanco


Against Aboutness oder: “How not to speak”

The anthropologist Martin Holbraad asked, “Can the thing speak?” thereby triggering the never-ending sequence of essays which in the tradition of Spivaks addressed the question of whether the subaltern could speak. Politics in art looks often enough at precisely articulating that which fails to be addressed in hegemonic speech. But what if language were not the appropriate medium, not even scientific language, but poetry at most? What if language itself is the problem, the wanted culprit that can only be tackled by saying that which cannot be declared via language? If something isn’t about something, but with something?

Stefanie Wenner is Professor of Applied Theater Studies at the HfBK Dresden and works on better representations of reality.