Biannual exhibition program, Spring 2019

Two Rubatos
Solo exhibition by Terre Thaemlitz
Japan-based multimedia producer, writer, public speaker, educator, audio remixer, DJ and owner of Comatonse Recordings

Footnotes on Equality
Collective exhibition by GRACE – Gender and Cultures of Equality in Europe, with Cookies
GRACE researchers (Alejandra Benítez Silva, Tegiye Birey, Orianna Calderòn, Zerrin Cengiz, Eleanor Drage, Athena M. Enderstein, Barbara Grabher, Lieke Hettinga, Johanna Levy, Wilmarie Rosado Pérez, Raluca Pinzari, Paola Prieto López, Zuzanna Szutenberg, Tommaso Trillò, Sara Verderi) and Cookies (Antonio Barone, Alice Grégoire, Federico Martelli and Clément Périssé)

What new tools and resources are necessary for a non-essentialist, non-capitalist identity politics that challenges existing notions of (in)equality and difference?

Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons is pleased to present two new exhibitions for the Spring edition of its biannual exhibition program: Two Rubatos, an experimental sound-focused solo exhibition by artist Terre Thaemlitz, and Footnotes on Equality, a collective exhibition of art and research by members of GRACE – Gender and Cultures of Equality in Europe in collaboration with Rotterdam-based architecture and design collective Cookies.

Two Rubatos, an exhibition by Terre Thaemlitz—who as a non-essentialist transgender person rotates gender pronouns—presents two new multimedia installations of existing piano solos and images originally utilized during live performances of her "Rubato" series from the late 1990s. "Rubato" is an open-meter improvisation method of musical performance that disregards strict tempo, instead varying it by either quickening or slackening. Her piano solos are renditions of songs by the well-known music band Kraftwerk and British electronic pop musician and producer Gary Numan that uses rubato as a core artistic method to trouble the melody recognition process. Thaemlitz’s sound work explores thematics of authorship, identity, and post-industrial technologies found in albums by Kraftwerk, as well as themes of sexual ambiguity in the works of Gary Numan. Likewise, the artist also presents image parodies to jaywalk with the sounds, and a critical essay that accompanies each rubato.

Footnotes on Equality, an exhibition by GRACE researchers in collaboration with Cookies, centers around an installation featuring an eclectic collection of art and everyday objects. The objects act as indexes for various contentious points around the cultural production of (in)equality, and props to tell stories about the contemporary fights against injustices. GRACE researchers have been conducting fieldwork across Europe that has brought them into contact with people or communities with life circumstances where struggles for equality take place but also get complexified—such as when equality for one group or issue means corresponding inequality for another. Objects are collected out of such situations and transformed into a labyrinth-like installation, inviting the viewer to consider their own situation of (in)equality and where it connects with others. Like Thaemlitz, the intention of the GRACE researchers and Cookies is to trigger the imagination for complexity, so it might be understood as an essential commoning method and value. The researchers take a critical stance towards how one’s struggle, right, or identity is co-opted and commodified—taken into a sort of “exclusive ownership”—in contemporary capitalist culture. Such structural processes may even lead some to be “against equality.” The exhibition is also an attempt to undo a disciplinary research process, and make art practice and co-creative work an integral part of research and how it is shared.

Both exhibitions are in line with Poetics of Living, one of Casco’s study lines on art and commoning practices, co-initiated with Rizvana Bradley. With Poetics of Living, we explore non-normative and non-binary ways of living together in consideration of rapidly changing discourses around sexuality, health, communal life, and death.

Read more about the exhibitions and their related program on casco.art 

*To register for the lecture by Terre Thaemlitz, email: nog@uu.nl