Opening: THU 22 03 2018, 7.00 PM

Duration: FRI 23 03 -  TUE 15 05 2018

Curated by: Katharina Brandl und Daniela Brugger

Artists: Johanna Braun (AT), Veronika Burger (AT), Veronika Eberhart (AT), Karin Ferrari (IT/AT), Roxanne Jackson (US), Robin J. Kang (US), Ariane Koch (CH) und Sarina Scheidegger (CH), Chantal Küng (CH) und Mara Züst (CH), Katja Lell (RU) und Laura Nitsch (DE/AT), Tabita Rezaire (FR), Linda Stupart (ZA), Suzanne Treister (UK)

The exhibition Magic Circle investigates current feminist interest in the figure of the witch within contemporary artistic production. Our present time has become an arena for surging disputes about the notion of truth; keywords such as “post-facticity” and the rise of populist strategies of simplification in the political realm evidence this development. Witch cultures provoked historically dissident forms of knowledge—and thus this interest of late in witches is also conceived as a vehicle to explore resistant knowledge and queer-feminist organisation models and their denunciations at a distance from the respective mainstream. Furthermore, the exhibition views the witch as a kind of hub, a departure point from which to chart different forms of social exclusion mechanisms: In post-Reformation Europe people the collective wanted to be rid of were vilified as a witch—often older women, homeless and poor persons, queer subjects.

The exhibition aims to enter into a dialogue with the activist-motivated reception of the witch in the 1970s in order to demonstrate that this current interest is definitely not ahistorical. However, the project focuses on the contemporary relevance of the topic by incorporating technological history, pop culture, knowledge structures, and social mechanisms of exclusion.