Wild Frictions: The Politics and Poetics of Interruption

About

Wild Frictions: The Politics and Poetics of Interruption explores minor disruptions, surprising and unforeseen interventions, delays and repetitions and their potential to show alternative ways of existing and behaving. Rather than looking to heroic eloquent figures or stimulating united/ collective moments, this exhibition locates emancipation in subtle idiosyncratic forms of mischief-making, in the playful slippages or in the spaces in between sounds and syllables.

“…wildness as a provocation, a retreat from the conventional, an affront to the normal and the expected, and an environmental condition.” 
(Jack Halberstam, Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire , 2020, p. 28) 

The subversive artistic approaches/ actions/ acts simultaneously evoke feelings of alienation and loss of control, which in turn reflect anxieties and tensions associated with the pandemic and social uprisings of the past and this year – the personal gridlock, the numerous protests and repeated quarantines, as well as economic and social pauses.
Through text, video, sound, installation, and performance, the artists of Wild Frictions employ strategies of interruption and blockage/ obstruction/ resistance to critique universal narratives, systems of oppression, and unconscious structural routines that characterize our everyday lives. 

„Gesucht: die Lücke im Ablauf, das Andre in der Wiederkehr des Gleichen, das Stottern im sprachlosen Text, das Loch in der Ewigkeit, der vielleicht erlösende Fehler.“
(Heiner Müller, Shakespeare‘s Factory 1 , 1985, S. 13) 

These disruptive artistic gestures may create discomfort or confusion, but simultaneously/ and therefore contain an immense potential: the ability to subvert and gently corrupt, to create cracks at the level of meaning and to open up new realities. Wild Frictions invites a poetic analysis and possible transgression of the boundaries that form universal modes of being, speaking and knowing today.

“When the facts change, I change my mind.” 
(Nora Turato, from the series “I’m on the verge of TOTAL VICTORY”, 2021) 

Participating artists: Félicia Atkinson, Trisha Baga, Cameron Downey, Anna Ehrenstein, Nikita Gale, keyon gaskin, Birgit Hein, Steffani Jemison, Kahlil Joseph, Ani Kasten, Christine Sun Kim, Janette Laverrière, Ouecha, Laure Prouvost, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Jimmy Robert, Pilvi Takala, Banu Ciçek Tülü, Nora Turato

Curators: Sandra Teitge and Amara Antilla
Research and text editing: Linnéa Meiners, Jorinde Splettstößer
Project management: Sofia Pfister
Technical production: Kristoffer Holmelund 
Assistance: Dani Hasrouni, Markus Hemann
Design: Louise Borinski

Kunstraum Kreuzberg/ Bethanien is an institution of the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg District Council.
Director: Stéphane Bauer

–The project is funded by the Capital Cultural Fund and the Senate Department for Culture and Europe: the Fund for Municipal Galleries, and the Fund for Exhibition Payments for Visual Artists.

–Wild Frictions is produced in collaboration with the Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati, where an iteration of the exhibition is on view April 9-September 19, 2021.