In Support: Violence of Support, group exhibition / performance programme. 2017.
 Photo courtesy Lukas Meßner
  • Exhibition text
    In Support is an exhibition program in three parts taking place from June 10 to September 2, 2017, at De Kijkdoos (Amsterdam), a row of outdoor vitrines accessible to the public 24/7. Providing support and being supportive implies not only being in contact, but being right up against the subject of concern, and taking it on-board, making common cause with it. Céline Condorelli, Support Structures ‘Devotion’ as the task of the dancer is not a theological diagnosis, not a martyrology, but a political affirmation… With the performance of devotion, the choreographic reveals itself to be that which produces an agent, that which produces an affect, and that which reminds us that the political, in order to come into the world, requires commitment, engagement, persistence, insistence, and daring. André Lepecki, Choreopolice and Choreopolitics The installations in this second strand of In Support address the violence that comes with or is caused by support as well as the idea of vulnerability and its relation to assemblages. Vulnerability and assembly here are concepts supported by Judith Butler’s body of work. As Isabelle Lorey, borrowing from Butler, explains: “Vulnerability becomes an extension of birth because initial survival already depends on social networks, on sociality and labour.” Resonating with this, the installations presented in the vitrines are of a very fragile nature, delicately poised yet powerfully transmitting their demands. Savannah Theis’s notebooks contain drawings of bodily sensations made as part of a daily drawing practice, a technique of recording and translating the corporeal into visible forms. Presenting the drawings as they are, within notebooks, demands a different kind of attention to the act of exhibiting, since selecting one page/drawing from a notebook means obscuring all the others, and further evokes the violence between the private and public in relation to support and communizing causes. Baha Görkem Yalım’s sculptures cross the curatorial border to reflect in close relation to Filter’s performance and Theis’s drawings. Performance artist Leon Filter presents his work Bent. The performance relies on a (possibly fictional) story told by the artist’s father about a forest of bent trees, where the trees were manipulated with splints to grow into the forms of ship-parts – a relatively fast and economic method of producing material for a burgeoning industry at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Following Filter’s attempt to find this forest and learn how to bend trees, Bent unfurls as an allegory for a variety of normalizing and standardizing procedures, shifting between natural and cultural ideas of the normal. In Support: Violence of Support July 15 – August 8 De Kijkdoos Weesperstraat 51, Amsterdam Open 24/7 Performance: Bent by Leon Filter July 15, 19.00 “In Support” is realized with the support of Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst / AFK
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