The Phantom Moves Through Space And Through Different Bodies
Helin Alas, Anna-Sophie Berger, Gerry Bibby & Henrik Olesen, Dora Budor, Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda, Jason Hirata, Bradley Kronz, Carolyn Lazard, Win McCarthy, Ser Serpas, Marina Sula
Exhibition
October 22, 2020 – January 5, 2021


Exhibition Booklet

The group exhibition The Phantom Moves Through Space and Through Different Bodies brings together artworks that negotiate social, psychological, and material dependencies arising from a normalized state of precarity in relation to artistic production.

The premise of this exhibition is that unstable labor relations such as job and health insecurity are no longer perceived as exceptional phenomena. Instead, the privatisation of risks and self-responsibility have been collectively accepted and today appear inevitable. As a “discourse consolidating power among those who wield the power to alternately promise its alleviation and threaten its continuation,” precarity has become a mode of subjugation, determining the frame in which subjectivities and speech acts emerge and take form. (1) It encompasses a general condition of unpredictability taking over the individual and collective body, its affective formations and social productions of space structured along the intersections of class, gender, race and ability.

This exhibition wants to juxtapose artworks that propose possibilities of mobilizing agencies and points of address in light of complicated economic, social and psycho- logical dependencies proper specifically to the field of art and their ramifications on artistic critique. When contemporary art is involved in global processes of de- regulation and the individualization of social issues, critical negation in artistic and institutional discourse may acquire a defensive function: a way of distancing and disowning the parts of our own practices, interests and institutions we judge as bad, enabling us to persist within them. (2)

The Phantom Moves Through Space and Through Different Bodies attempts to inhabit the split resulting from our investments in these structures and complicate the dynamics that govern artistic production and reception: How, with what kind of aesthetic dispositions, spatial interventions and modes of production can uncertainty become a tool of productive interference?

Curated by Franziska Sophie Wildförster


(1) Isabell Lorey, State of Insecurity: Governance of the Precarious, 2015
(2) Andrea Fraser, Autonomy and its Contradictions, 2012

Marina Sula, The phantom moves, 2020. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti
Dora Budor, Nicotine Museum, 2020, Anna-Sophie Berger, Benjamin, 2020, and Bradley Kronz, The Decision Not To Renovate, 2017. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti
Carolyn Lazard, Austerity Prayer, 2020. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti
The Phantom Moves Through Space And Through Different Bodies, installation view, Kevin Space, Vienna, 2020. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti
The Phantom Moves Through Space And Through Different Bodies, installation view, Kevin Space, Vienna, 2020. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti
Win McCarthy, Mr. Innocent, 2020. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti
Marina Sula, The phantom moves, 2020. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti
Ser Serpas, i dont know how to clean my brushes properly and dont want to waste paint for every set of paintings i designate a large swath of canvas as a space to get rid of excess paint but still use it and see it in the room so this is what this is its usually nailed to a neigh- boring ceiling or wall i used this one from november of last year to january of this year for about the length of thirty six paintings, 2020, Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda, The Sixth Year, 2013, and Helin Alas, Dream House, Second Visualization (developed in a workshop by Alex Wissel), 2020. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti
The Phantom Moves Through Space And Through Different Bodies, installation view, Kevin Space, Vienna, 2020. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti
Carolyn Lazard, Austerity Prayer, 2020. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti
Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda, The Sixth Year, 2013. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti
The Phantom Moves Through Space And Through Different Bodies, installation view, Kevin Space, Vienna, 2020. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti
Gerry Bibby & Henrik Olesen, Costumes, 1. Red on white, 2016/2020. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti
Helin Alas, Dream House, Second Visualization (developed in a workshop by Alex Wissel), 2020. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti
Gerry Bibby & Henrik Olesen, Costumes, 1. Red on white, 2016/2020. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti
Marina Sula, The phantom moves, 2020. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti
Jason Hirata, Why Not Lie?, 2020. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti
Jason Hirata, Floaters, 2020 and Why Not Lie?, 2020. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti
The Phantom Moves Through Space And Through Different Bodies, installation view, Kevin Space, Vienna, 2020. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti
Win McCarthy, Mr. Innocent, 2020 and Jason Hirata, Why Not Lie?, 2020. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti
Anna-Sophie Berger, Benjamin, 2020 and Dora Budor, Nicotine Museum, 2020. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti
Bradley Kronz, The Decision Not To Renovate, 2017. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti
Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda, Some Made Up Names, 2013. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti
The Phantom Moves Through Space And Through Different Bodies, installation view, Kevin Space, Vienna, 2020. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti
Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda, The Sixth Year, 2013. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti
Helin Alas, Dream House, Second Visualization (developed in a workshop by Alex Wissel), 2020. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti
The Phantom Moves Through Space And Through Different Bodies, installation view, Kevin Space, Vienna, 2020. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti
Gerry Bibby & Henrik Olesen, Costumes, 3. White and pink on black, 2016/2020. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti
The Phantom Moves Through Space And Through Different Bodies, installation view, Kevin Space, Vienna, 2020. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti
Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda, The Sixth Year, 2013. Photo: Maximilian Anelli-Monti