Nächst St. Stephan

ASSISTANTS OF THE VOID / ASSISTENTEN DER LEERE
Toyen, Ahmed Morsi, Sophie Podolski, Katinka Bock, June Crespo, Flaka Haliti
13 September – 25 October 2019

Curator: Adam Budak, curated by 2019 Circulation

a void lurks through and behind the cosmic window of roberto bolaño’s final words of “the savage detectives” polyphonic travelogue; an abyss outlined by a progression of empty spaces, devouring one another, like the lives of poets in pursuit of immortality and transcendence; such is an interrupted cycle, a circularity in question, a loop in cul-de-sac, operating through gaps and incompleteness, in-between the galaxies, “a disproportionate ocean of emptiness”. suspended in a vacuum, within a potentiality and under a pressure of a deficit and lack, we rehearse an alphabet of errors and imposed excess; spasm, not breath; absence, not expectation; towards the visceral, the visceral realism.

“i am an unfinished poem”, declares sophie podolski. “true imagination”, bolaño completes with sarcasm, “is that which destroys, elucidates, injects emerald microbes into other imaginations”. the visceral realism is “a love letter, the demented strutting of a dumb bird in the moonlight, something essentially cheap and meaningless”, or in other words, “a philosophy of the remainder, of remains, of incomplete burials, of forms of life animated by forces of death (and vice versa)”, an ultimate (and probably most vicious) circulation of mental and corporeal matter, a flow of disconnected particles in a disenchanted universe of a failed science. disfunction and disbelief levitate, challenging a void of a desiring machine; longing, forgetting, disappearing resist the system and the substance. fulfillment and alienation oscillate in a vertigo of contradictory sensations.

this exhibition doesn’t take circulation for granted though; it questions the everything flows mantra. it rejects circularity too; we ain’t perfect. the linear system has failed (us); we inhabit a pause, an interruption, a disconnection. lines do not meet as we live parallel lives; lives that do not match, passwords that keep expiring, invalid codes that take over the everyday routine; air gets toxic, fluids explode. we’re erased subjects. “I’m a chattering blackbird”, podolski chants, “I’m a puddle of oil - I’m a child sitting on the floor waiting to be rewarded. ... (we are never more than assistants of the void).”