knotting unruly ties

Location:

nGbK, Karl-Liebknecht-Str. 11/13, 10178 Berlin

Contributors:

AG Art Worker Solidarity, Mel Baggs, Casa Kuà, Nino Bulling, Vika Kirchenbauer, Bär Kittelmann, knowbotiq, İz Öztat, Amanda Priebe, Anikẹ Joyce Sadiq, Sickness Affinity Group, Steckenpferde Webserie AG

nGbK working group:

Jyl Franzbecker, Tyan Fritschy, Sonja Hornung, Mizu Sugai, Ülkü Süngün

Property influences both power relations and our capacity for action, permeating how we view ourselves and the world. The modern concept of property emerged in bourgeois Europe as it began its colonial expansion. Since then, it violently differentiates between two modes: the capacity to dispose over land, things, and other people, and the obligation to make one’s own body and its labor available. Property continues to carry forward the scars of this violence.

knotting unruly ties addresses property’s affective power as it is countered by collective forms of resistance. Through an exhibition, a web series, and workshops, the project draws attention to spaces, bodies, and relationships that are intractable to dominant forms of control. The labor conditions of the art field are questioned, while an artist interrogates her own (in)capacity for action in light of her contractual obligations to the state. Past and present moments of enclosure are recorded as they echo in the land and our relationships. Through reconstructing a neighborhood square, migrant experience is rewritten into space. A photocopier is appropriated in order to redistribute knowledge. Invasive weeds from industrialized and colonized landscapes form alliances with electronic entities. A manifesto hints at how to be in the world by singing with it.

The exhibition seeks (aesthetic) forms that describe unruly, interdependent forms of relating to one another and with the world. These might be based on solidarity, resistance, mutual care, and the refusal of self-ownership: knotting unruly ties.

Information in Easy Language and DGS (German).

The knotting unruly ties two-part web series is online!

The first episode is inspired by a legend about a person who is offered all the land he can circle around on horseback in one day. A number of hobby horse riders move through the city, seemingly arriving nowhere. Neither self-ownership nor their soft protective gear can prevent the onset of exhaustion.

In the second episode, two friends meet in a Berlin späti. In the heat of a drama about love and property, a discussion unfolds about how property inscribes itself into our bodies and our relationships.

Episode 1: Steckenpferde reiten

Episode 2: At the Späti