Exhibition
Attempts To Be Many
30 Oct 2021 – 23 Jan 2022
Regular hours
- Saturday
- 14:00 – 18:00
- Sunday
- 14:00 – 18:00
- Friday
- 16:00 – 20:00
Cost of entry
Pay what you wish.
Address
- Birkenstraße 47
- Düsseldorf
North Rhine-Westphalia - 40233
- Germany
Nara Bak, Jana Buch, Donja Nasseri, Anys Reimann, Arisa Purkpong, Theresa Weber
About
The works shown in Attempts to be Many address the plurality
of identities, revise historical assumptions and thereby enable
the retelling of body tales (Körpererzählungen) and learned
narratives. Subversive additions to, as well as reformulations and
recontextualizations of images, symbols and narratives
representative of a hierarchical society (Dominanzgesellschaft)
emerge in the process. The works exhibited in the Philara
Collection navigate a series of complex questions concerning
class, race, gender, sexuality and identity, and community.
Collage is fed by the omnipresence of visual material being
produced by contemporary society. Fragments taken from this
ubiquitous circulation are juxtaposed and overlapped and thus
detached from ascribed meaning, carrying them over into new
contexts that permit hybrid interpretations. Similar to the
practices of sampling and mashup (in music), collage
techniques incorporate pre-existing elements from different,
unknown, sometimes antagonistic sources and mark a process-
based approach conceived to unify associative and concrete
meanings and allow for alternative readings.
Especially in times of conflict and social upheaval, collage
unfolds its emancipatory potential; it allows artists to visualize
contradictions and emphasize the expanded variety of possible
readings. The use of easily accessible and freely circulating
materials from magazines or digital content from the internet
often alludes to underlying political, activist and economic
motives. Based on a transcendence of boundaries, they become
objects of (re)presentation. With regard to questions on cultural
identity and the way we perceive ourselves, collage is a suitable
method for shifting notions of identity from ideologically one-
dimensional perceptions and rigid attributions towards dynamic,
ongoing processes of (self-)discovery.