Opening: Thu, 08.05.2025, 7pm
Duration: Fri, 09.05. – Sat, 17.05.2025
Performances:
Thu, 08.05.2025, 8pm
Wed, 14.05.2025, 6pm
Artists: andrea ancira, Tekla Aslanishvili, Caitlin Berrigan, Mustafa Emin Büyükcoşkun, Gris García, Pille-Riin Jaik, Izidora I LETHE, Yen Noh, Vrishali Purandare, Emily Sarsam, Olia Sosnovskaya, Olga Zovskaya
Curators: andrea ancira, Gris García, Yen Noh, Vrishali Purandare and Olga Zovskaya, with support by Laura Birschitzky
What is the basis of solidarity? The answer is usually: empathy – our ability to put ourselves in the shoes of others. But what if this answer falls short? What if empathy not only fails to enable solidarity, but actually undermines its potential?
The group exhibition Leakage, Breaching, Motley Tongues challenges the liberal model of solidarity based on empathy and identification. Building on the concept of “imperfect solidarities” by theorist and art critic Aruna D'Souza, it focuses on what supposedly stands in the way of the realization of solidarity: Difference, dissent, incomprehension. The thesis: solidarity begins where mutual understanding ends – and yet one is willing to care for and with each other.
How can divergence be made politically productive? How does one rethink and practice solidarity beyond unity? Leakage, Breaching, Motley Tongues engages with these questions through various formal and conceptual artistic strategies.
Curatorial statement:
“Leakage, Breaching, Motley Tongues explores ways to practice solidarities at a moment when existing organizational models for liberatory alliance are tested by surging waves of racial capitalism, (post)colonial necropolitics and neoliberal fascism. Can we resist liberalism’s desire for solidarity based on empathy and understanding, and instead engage in contradiction, mistranslation, and incomprehension as generative forms to reshape solidarities? If so, what politics would emerge? The exhibition envisages this movement.
Leakage, Breaching, Motley Tongues draws on Aruna D’Souza’s framing of ’imperfect solidarities,’ which embraces incomprehension as a possibility for politics. Alongside Amitav Ghosh and Édouard Glissant, D’Souza asks whether solidarity can emerge on the basis of linguistic and cultural opacity. In its less harmful form, a politics of empathy based on emotional identification often falls into homogenizing traps of ’diversity’ and ’inclusivity.’ At its worst, it can strengthen and whitewash the growth of neo-fascist ideologies. Dwelling in incomprehensibility is an alternative that creates the potential to preserve differences and enable solidarity beyond unity. It opens up a space for leakage, breaching, and motley tongues – giving way to new relationalities within difference.”
PhD-in-Practice Program: Leakage, Breaching, Motley Tongues is a cooperation between Kunstraum Niederoesterreich and the PhD-in-Practice program of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.