12 November 2017 – 21 January 2018
Techne and the Decency of Means has developed and formulated itself through newly realised works by artists working across exhibition space and stage, draws on the ancient Greek understanding of ‘téchne’ as a methodology and attitude.
In its original classical usage, techne is a looping term, a description of making understood as material and functional, as well as immaterial and uncontainable. It is a term proposing a unity and interdependence of two forms of knowledge – theoretical and practical, without internal separation or hierarchy.
Many of the works in Techne and the Decency of Means inhabit multiple and simultaneously held roles and functions. From Andrew Norman Wilson’s This Light, operating as a sculpture, a cinema and a prototype, to Ulrich Bernhardt’s part-oven, part-sculpture and performance, Die Schrecklich Gute Mutter. These multi-form works are realised as settings, environments that are stepped into, a quality extending to the sculpture park and events space of Annabella Spielmannleitner and Benjamin Köder’s Setting Sculpture.
The video works, performances and structures in this exhibition have shared the production platform which is Techne, a framework focused on the conditions and movements between intention and material. What recurs in the works developed, is a curiosity and commitment to a process of thinking through materials, and of arriving at an understanding of form-content that involves an active attention to what making as a process reveals. This question of following both an original intention, but also attuning to the ways in which a technology or materiality shapes processes back, involves a reflection on conditions of alienation.
The ancient notion of techne is no longer in active use. And yet, this process has been one of staying put, for a longer period of time and through the realisation of multiple projects, with a term that oscillates, loops and negotiates between what is and what isn’t (yet). This exhibition is one point in these conversations, exchanges and productions, a process of introducing techne to doubt, ecological dread, and alienation, as well as to the pleasure and delight of bringing something into being.
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images: Frank Kleinbach
Techne and the Decency of Means is curated by Fatima Hellberg and Johanna Markert (Künstlerhaus Stuttgart) with Marie Bues and Martina Grohmann (Theater Rampe). The title is a homage to poet, writer and filmmaker Stefan Themerson for whom the decency of means was the “aim of aims.”
Opening times Wed–Sun 12–6pm
Künstlerhaus Stuttgart
Reuchlinstraße 4b
70178 Stuttgart
www.kuenstlerhaus.de
