radical⇌matter exhibition
Opening
Opening 25 January 2024, 18:00-20:00
AIL - Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab
Postsparkasse – Georg-Coch-Platz 2
1010 Vienna
radical⇌matter: when materialism is no longer enough
radical⇌matter: when materialism is no longer enough invites you to take part in a sumptuous, sometimes wild, sometimes uncanny experiment on the now. Our exhibition is the physical manifestation of a small but persistent worry, one that began to circulate with the onset of cybernetics or perhaps even earlier, with the 1942 Manhattan project. Or perhaps even a little earlier when Maxwell’s 1865 equation marking out a new kind of time – bending the future and the past to situate the present – prompted an entire re-imagining of the role of energy, speed, mass and with it, an entire re-imaging of the materiality of the world as we now know it. Maybe it even began before the beginning of the worry, say, in 60 BC when Lucretius the poet-philosopher, danced into the very concept of matter, the materialisation of movement itself – as ‘ontological swerve’, a plurally-flexed grounding choreography so tempestuous, so delicious, so erotically raw that whole swathes of time, memory, rhythm, beat come alive as though on fire! Such was (and remains) the power of this ancient knowledge system, so innocently filed under the name ‘matter’.
So, to our small, but not insignificant, worry. What if the entirely respectable world of Metaphysics, and, more precisely, those dialectical frameworks that privilege ‘materialism’ as a (or even the) key to understanding, challenging and/or changing our contemporary now – no longer can attend to today’s forms of agency – say black, feminist, queer, trans; What if it turns out that materialism in all its finery, is still unable to account for why the rise of populist fascisms is happening at pace in some places but not others; or the importance of inventing (and implementing) different collective assemblages – say new democratic imaginaries, ethics and responsibilities.
Like putting a big foot in a little shoe, what if all these so-called ‘contemporary now’ problems are, as is usually the case, relegated as ‘exceptions’ to the usual universalist rules of a materialist framework – wholly incapable of addressing new kinds machine-human-interspecies co-evolutions, new forms of war (guerrilla/bot/drone) and new, oddly cathected instances of intelligence (artificial, distributed, surveilled).
Come join us on our journey – here bringing together contemporary philosophers, artists, djs, blues-jazz poets, computer engineers, the common octopus, independent filmmakers, physicists, metal worker, gamers, mycelium, architects, two volumes of the radical matter journal, and a few polymorphic beasts – to inhabit a different kind of matter – as bridge, as wake, as frottage, as an emergent flow, an intensity and circulation.
Artists: Amir Bastan, Sonia Bernac, Yasmine Boudiaf, Jonathan Boyd, Bernhard Cella, Clarissa Leonie Cohausz, Selina de Beauclair, Sylvia Eckermann, Maximilian Gallo, Johnny Golding, Ivonne Gracia Murillo, Tonica Hunter, Ajamu Ikwe-Tyehimba, Ameera Kawash, Jeremy Keenan, Gerhard Lang, Tina Lechner, Thandi Loewenson, Manu Luksch, Gerald Nestler, Jannis Neumann, Harold Offeh, Julian Palacz, Mukul Patel, Maggie Roberts, Ashley Hans Scheirl, Linn Phyllis Seeger, Dario Srbic, Noor Stenfert Kroese, Tanja Traxler, Shira Wachsmann, John Wild, Julia Wolf
Curatorial Team: Johnny Golding, Martin Reinhart, Tanja Traxler, Julia Wolf
Designers: Ivonne Gracia Murillo, Maximilian Gallo
Impressions of the opening by Lea Fabienne Dörl
The radical⇌matter exhibition and symposium owe their realisation to the generous support of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). Hosted by Angewandte’s Art & Science department, these events are a collaborative effort with the Royal College of Art, London, and the AiDesign Lab in Artificial and Distributed Intelligence, Hong Kong. We would like to thank the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), AIL - Angewandte Innovation Lab, Angewandte Collection & Archive, Ange- wandte University Gallery, Zentrum Fokus Forschung, FJK3 - Contemporary Art Space, Fiona Liewehr, Cosima Rainer, Robert Müller, all the participating artists and all the other wonderful people who made this project possible.