Katharina Karrenberg and Olivier Guesselé-Garai
Opening: 23 June 2023 from 7 pm,
8 pm: performance THANKS … because … with Katharina Karrenberg
Exhibition: extended to 13 August 2023
Finissage: Sunday August 13, 3-6pm – at 5pm: Performance Part II:
THANKS … because … with Katharina Karrenberg
Open by appointment: mailto@after-the-butcher.de or: 0178 3298 106
The exhibition ENCORE UN EFFORT _2023_ AN EFFORT AGAIN brings together various works from the two artists’ ongoing artistic processes.
Katharina Karrenberg’s work deals in depth with manifestations of structural and social violence. She reflects on these structures of violence as a fundamental condition of current, capitalist power, both multinational corporations and state power apparatuses such as the military, police and secret services…, they camouflage themselves, are permanently present, yet often invisible, are maintained biopolitically, then again visible by their disguises, uniforms and embody “the state-sanctioned, group-differentiated susceptibility to premature death” (after Ruth Wilson Gilmores).
Structures of violence do not lie around somewhere inaccessible and unchanging, but actively intervene in our daily dealings with people, animals and things and are thus also actively changeable. With her works, Katharina Karrenberg develops a radical critique of these omnipresent relations of violence, of various –[un]visible, concealed but also performative approaches and forms of repression and open death violence. The exhibits simultaneously reflect their mutual otherness–their abstraction, their concretion and their respective specific materials, in which the hostile coldness of neo-capitalist relations becomes tangible.
Olivier Guesselé-Garai develops a very personal artistic language in which social questions are subtly negotiated. He examines an everyday object, such as the refrigerator, by disassembling and reassembling it, questioning its function and structural qualities, discovering abstract parts and forms that were previously hidden, so to speak. It is a playful process and at the same time Olivier Guesselé-Garai also understands the artistic work as a form of resistance, where the affirmation of being through consciousness and its quiet strength uses poetry, joy and love to invite us together and above all in otherness to reflect on our world.
