Kunsthalle Düsseldorf

Artists: Keltie Ferris, Ilse Henin, Hayv Kahraman, Gisela McDaniel, Soraya Sharghi, Emma Talbot

The exhibition is curated by Gregor Jansen and Alicia Holthausen.

The artist Ilse Henin marks the starting point of the exhibition Die unhintergehbare Verflechtung aller Leben (The Inescapable Intertwining of All Lives). She studied in West Germany in the late 1960s, a time marked by political and social unrest, but also artistic solidarity and a love for experimentation combined with anti-capitalist critique. After taking a break from art in the 1970s, since she felt that the scene was too male dominated, she returned in the 1980s to create an artistic and social counterculture and to develop a body of work that reflects her personal image of society and culture. This extraordinary life’s work is now featured in an entire room in this exhibition.

Based on Henin’s works, a web of connections is traced to the five younger, contemporary artists in the exhibition. The works by Keltie Ferris, Hayv Kahraman, Gisela McDaniel, Soraya Sharghi, and Emma Talbot have in common the intertwining of supposedly female motifs, materials, and techniques, yet they have each developed these in their own unique ways and placed them in a contemporary context. At the same time, conventional notions of gender are questioned.

The works by these six artists show a processuality that leads the viewer from the 1960s to the present, from painting to drawing to sculpture and installations, from femininity to masculinity to diversity. Above all, however, it is a process of empowerment. In the works themselves as well as in their combination, groups, associations, and processes are formed which, despite their differences, reveal numerous parallels. They show the struggle for justice and self-determination which artists have long had to pursue and continue to pursue today in a world (and art world) that is still dominated by cis males.

The title of the exhibition Die unhintergehbare Verflechtung aller Leben refers to an interview by The Collective Eye with Judith Butler from 2022 in which they emphasizes the necessity of collective coexistence for justice in society. Based on this, society is to be understood as a complex network of diverse actors, not only humans, but also non-human life forms, such as animals, plants, fungi and organisms. There is a desire for a new collectivity within this society, for the interconnection of an entire ecosystem that influences, conditions, but also protects one another.