“DEBT: Unsettling Matters of Interest” / You Breathe Differently Under the Weight

DEBT: Unsettling Matters of Interest
Symposium with Lucía Cavallero, Luce deLire, Bassam El Baroni, Toon Fibbe, Fritz-Julius Grafe, Ibrahim Kombarji, Felix Krämer, Isabell Lorey, Vasna Ramasar, Christoph Sorg
With a spatial activation by Temporary Spaces / University of the Arts Bremen
May 22–23, 2025

You Breathe Differently Under the Weight: Debt and Credit
Exhibition with Alice Creischer, Moyra Davey, Denise Ferreira da Silva & Arjuna Neuman, Toon Fibbe, Lili Huston-Herterich, Santu Mofokeng, Natascha Nassir-Shahnian, Jochen Schmith, Miriam Stoney
June 7–September 7, 2025

Opening: Friday, June 6, 2025, 7pm
Performance of Council of Scales by Miriam Stoney at 10pm

The impact of debt on bodies, organisms, relationships and affects, as well as on environments and infrastructures, is often obscured by financial abstractions and moral charge. The group exhibition and symposium invite a shift in perspective for a transdisciplinary exploration of how such liabilities materialize in identities and representations, how they operate in transtemporal geographies, through which media and apparatuses of social differentiation, and how they can be owned, resisted, or subverted.

A renewed prevalence of debt in political discourse accounts to significant changes in both global power dynamics and environmental conditions. Moreover, regimes of compulsory growth today claim the investment of borrowed funds as a prerequisite for sustained production in postindustrial societies. Such a paradigm indicates an extension, if not an escalation, of the conceptual analogy between artistic practice and a financialized present outlined by theorist Marina Vishmidt and others in the notion of speculation. Yet once the stakes are exhausted, it goes into debt.

The cooperation between the GAK, the University of Bremen, the Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg, and the University of the Arts Bremen stages encounters between artistic, scholarly, performative, activist, and everyday epistemologies. Symposium and exhibition inform each other, questioning the constitutive matter and weight of images and objects, architectures and landscapes, communities and practices that we invest in, consciously or subconsciously, and on a daily basis.

Following Leigh Claire LaBerge’s proposition that there is "no more abstraction," the symposium examines debt’s diachronic resonances through topical junctures: "Bodies," "Ecologies," and "Infrastructures" provides connective instances and points of departure for situated analyses of how property, value, and interest as structures of both debt and art since the becoming of modernity unfold in a speculative contemporary. The artworks, performances, and papers present fictions and figurations of debt beyond their rationalization in moral or symbolic narratives.

In the exhibition, close readings of materials and narratives are brought together along the lines of representation, extraction and withdrawal to explore the residues of debt and its operational power. The artists involved emphasize the very materiality of currency, expose the arbitrary correlations of weight, value and progression, or untie the intricate connections between exploitation and accumulation of resources. They offer counter-images, deploy strategies of play, and navigate between distance and tangibility to recuperate an inherent absurdity, and invest in memory and traces rather than money.

Instead of explanatory containment, the joint project aims to contribute to an extended understanding of debt from a transactional—and oftentimes universalized—arrangement towards a formative instance rendered discontinuously in digits and weight.

Registration for the symposium is not required, no conference fee will be charged. For wheelchair accessibility please contact office@gak-bremen.de

Additional information and the full program of the symposium can be found here.
Additional information on the exhibition can be found here.

The project is initiated by the University of Bremen and GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, and realized in cooperation with Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg and University of the Arts Bremen.

Concept and organization: Susanne Huber (Universität Bremen), Annette Hans (GAK Bremen)