Repeats (Figures and Infrastructures)

Anbefalet under Det skal du se! uge 16
Repeats (Figures and Infrastructures) begins from the trail of accidents and aporia cast behind infrastructures and their descriptions. Most often it’s bodies, rendered as exemplary or excessive figures that are left aside. Extraneous to the systematic rules and delivery of resources and services, they are too resistant, too complex for a vision of systems that dream of rationalizing everything. But the figure as a model from which subjects are to be copied, also makes it known that rationality – big tunnels, thick cables, gargantuan data, pervasive networks, just-in-time logistics – are not all there is with infrastructure. Uneven development, murky truths, ocean crossings, contagious others, selective freedoms are also central to delivering daily life.

Repeats (Figures and Infrastructures) puts the figure back at the center of the frame. The work of Anna Zett, Asta Meldal Lynge, Dorine van Meel, Katie Hare, Paul Maheke, Simeon Barclay, Seecum Cheung, and Will Sheridan Jr., in different ways, points to the formation of social structures through cultural infrastructures, narrative, images, politics, movement and circulation. Not only do they see how social systems are reproduced, but who is asked to bear that task too. Here, a new suggestive language of infrastructure is put forth: of identity collapses and formation, and the empty figures of nation; shedding, traces, and entangled histories of violence and institutions that cannot be escaped; affinity, configuration and alignments, surface and spatial politics. Familiar representations that either pull back to scale, or trawl the depths of abstraction and metaphor are put aside, for the cultural practices that join together, tear at the layers, or repeat and normalize infrastructural narratives as the way of the everyday, and infrastructure is asked to meet those figures more deliberately.

The artists are Anna Zett, Asta Meldal Lynge, Katie Hare, Dorine van Meel, Paul Maheke, Simeon Barclay, Seecum Cheung, and Will Sheridan Jr. Curated by Tom Clark.

Kilde: SixtyEight Art Institute