Overview
The group exhibition “Sweat” is the result of two years of intensive research. The show is dedicated to the phenomenon of bodies that act together and shape their present. Breaking a sweat in the face of violent attempts to control the human body represents an artistic strategy of resistance.
If we are witnessing the global scale of systemic injustice at an unprecedented scale, we are also assisting to the impressive growth of alliances of transnational resistance movements. The group exhibition “Sweat” brings together more than twenty artistic voices that respond to several conditions of political pressure.
The artistic positions range from presentday to pioneering works from the 1970s and ‘80s that mobilised feminist and postcolonial movements in art and society, opening up historical perspectives on artistic languages that are embedded in forms of radical social emancipation.
“Sweat” is traversed by unique poetics of pleasure and polyphony that counter politics of enmity and exclusion through the creation of sensual acts of self-determination and the materialization of stories that have hitherto been silenced and rendered invisible.
The artists make use of dynamic media such as dance, film, and video that attest to ephemeral civil choreographies and activate collaborative and archival processes, building on communities and their cultures. Through practices of non-hierarchical recycling, collaging, and sampling of collective and personal imagery, they postulate worlds as vital assemblages of multiple cultural influences and temporalities, disrupting biased mainstream narratives and representations.
Sweat, Installation view, Haus der Kunst, 2021. Photo: Max Geuter.
