STRESS REHEARSAL AT DAS WEISSE HAUS, VIENNA

The group exhibition Stress Rehearsal is a curatorial project of Malou Solfjeld – curator in residence at Das Weisse Haus, Vienna in 2020. It has been developed in the Covid-19 crisis and been running through the turmoil of local lockdowns, closed and reopened several times. I’m not sure if the show initially was conceived as a direct respond to the pandemic, because it raises a much broader spectrum of issues around climate change, neo-colonial violence, dystopian future scenarios and paralysing catastrophism. However, not only did the moment demanded relevant optics, but it exacerbated the problems originally embedded into Western ecologies and made them perceivable on the global scale.

Despite disaster unfolding before our eyes, we’ve been craving ‘back to normal’ which is terribly absurd, because it was exactly ‘the normality’ that brought us to the point we find ourselves in right now. I believe that Stress Rehearsal exposes this macabre body of our normality, with its damaged parts lit up, and questions if a return back is what we really need.

The show is built upon a storytelling which opens with the videos Crowd Control (2018) and Katasrophenübung (2020) by Clemens von Wedemeyer and finally resolving in the film Veridis Quo (2016) by Lola González – these art works are positioned as two opposite points on the polar coordinate system and enclose the narration within.

In Crowd Control, von Wedemeyer demonstrates police software for pattern systematisation and mass movements management – technological control over protests converts the democratic freedom of expression in data analysis and digital simulation for better police contraction. Here we observe how dehumanized and depoliticized protests have become, as they appear rather as a study case for law enforcement than a social act of solidarity and call for dialogue. Next to it, Katasrophenübung (or disaster exercise) documents a rescue team on an emergency response training. Staged and played through, a ferry accident is transformed into an uncanny action with the blurred borders between reality and spectacle. These two artworks provide a strong delusional start of the show – the machinery of control, whose agents are just as supervised and controlled as the communities they regulate, and the machinery of disaster that functions like a clockwork theatre.

Clemens von Wedemeyer, Crowd Control (2018). Photo: Theresa Wey.

Across the gallery space, upstairs from the round room, there is a video, Veridis Quo (2016), which evolves a quasi-counterpart imagery – it is a protest, but like a daydream, like a fantasy. A group of young people stay in a remote property where they practice interacting and shooting blindly – children’s games like hide-and-seek in the garden are exercised along with weapon handling. Although filmed in 2016, it evokes lockdown sensation of confinement and fatigue. The protagonists appear to resist something in the outside world – a system, a danger? – and train to confront and combat it.

Lola González, Veridis Quo (2016). Video still.

Watching the video, I couldn’t help thinking about how weapon stores were kept open during the lockdowns in Austria. Together with grocery shops and pharmacies, apparently regarded as essential goods suppliers, they’ve remained unaffected. In the moment of increasing precarity, social disbalance, and mental strain, weapons have been kept available. So, in Veridis Quo, heavily armed young people raise together against the imaginary threat, but we see that they are confined within a collective dream, alienated from reality. González warns against the protest becoming romantic and incapable, converting into the domain of escapists and Don Quixotes, and to become irrelevant. Veridis Quo – meaning ‘where are you going’ – emphasizes the disoriented position of the rebel bodies.

In this way, Stress Rehearsal’s narrative unfolds from the machine of control to the phantasm of the protest, and vice versa.

All around Lola González’s video, we find Protectors (2017) by Rachel Fäth – tech totems potentially to be worn on a person. Assembled from different upcycled materials like headphones, backpacks and keychains and encrusted with crystals, ceramics and stones, the sculptures are provided with belts as if they could be fastened around bodies and carried on a back or a chest. Futuristic charms to protect their owners during post-anthropocentric journeys. They belong to new rituals, which thrive on deep uncertainty and contribute to the re-enchantment of the world. As we are challenged to imagine post-human scenarios with nature-technology hybrids and robot-human minds, tech spirituality is emerging out of the search for possible communication. Artificial Intelligence is becoming an oracle, esoteric knowledge meets algorithms, fetishes are circulating on NFT marketplaces. Protectors thus alert us that we’d better have guarding talismans on us.

In her curatorial text, Malou Solfjeld refers to Bruno Latour’s article Is this a dress rehearsal? which expands on the politics of the pandemic. Latour calls the situation a ‘caricature of a time that is no longer ours’ and refers not to the transformed perception of time within lockdowns, but the awakened biopower strategies sourced from the past. Performed for the sake of population health, governments have restored closed national borders and police control, extended mass surveillance and taken away social rights, while at the same time increased the overexploitation of the most vulnerable social groups. Is it truly a time we are living in? – some might ask. I believe so, and so does Elisabeth Molin. Her project Echo (2020) is a collection of wrist watches with mirrors encased in the dial’s places. Originally Molin proposed the employers of Das Weisse Haus to wear them, however new hygiene measurements discouraged that idea – yet the watches are fastened around the water pipes in the gallery and displayed on a shelf. What time is it? None. Reflecting the surrounding space or a face of an observer, echo watches cancel not so much the category of time, as its linearity – none of time is equal to all of time.

This state of liminality is typical for many artworks in the show – they reflect the in-betweenness or half-transformed body of the presence. Addressing biology, we can find a good example for understanding it: In insects’ metamorphosis. To become adult species, insects undergo a complex transformation with nymph as an in-between stage. A nymph already possesses features of a mature species, but in undeveloped forms that sometimes makes it look strangely different. I am writing about this so precise, because it caught my attention in the curatorial introduction of Daniel Mølholt Bülow – ‘attraction’ to nymphs. I find it symptomatic to contemporary context, because the whole situation of uncertainty and vagueness stimulates the imagery of a transitional phase. Like observing a nymph, we are trying to unravel how these yet immature, but already visible parts of reality will develop and fully form in the future? Is it a monster we are growing into? Bülow’s Application for Miss Moore (2020) presents a pair of reptile leather gloves with pink claws placed on a glitter shelf – the anxiety of metamorphosis is converted into a glamorous horror show. The gloves, like cracked-through shells left by a nymph, awaken images of a bizarre transformation which might have happened here.

Rah Eleh, #oreo_liveitwhite (2019). Photo: Theresa Wey.

The idea of disguise appears in one more project – #oreo_liveitwhite (2019) by Rah Eleh, however, it is elaborated in a different way. (Just a brief remark – have you noticed how much is connected to theatre and theatricality in the exhibition? The reference to ‘dress rehearsal’ sets up a certain perspective, and then we have critically integrated dress-up moments and a certain playfulness which is the one of grotesque’s). Eleh builds up her work, an Instagram account, upon the iconography of white supremacy and the male gaze. Disguising and making up as a conventionally beautified white woman, she stages stereotypic mise-en-scènes of everyday life marked with hashtags #arayngirl #araynbaby #blondehairdontcare #blueeyes. Funny, but disturbing images of the blonde-wigged and heavily filtered Iranian artist surrounded by cupcakes and fluffy kittens undermine the established visual codes of white cuteness massively cultivated within social media. Accompanied by the private chat screenshots, they demonstrate the ill and defective mindset embedded into contemporary cultures.

Gillian Brett, Smart Food: better for you and the planet (2019). Photo: Theresa Wey.

I think, this oscillation between funny and terrifying creates the nerve of the exhibition Stress Rehearsal – attracted by whimsical shapes and mechanisms, like for example in Gillian Brett’s Smart Food: better for you and the planet (2019), we then experience a disillusioning slap in the face while being directed to see the critical strong messages behind the alluring visuals. Or like in Yein Lee’s Me Moi series (2018-19), which appealing shapes turn to manifest potential bodies’ deviation through mutations, accumulation of plastic waste within, and fusion with technology.

Yein Lee, Me Moi Series (2018-19). Photo: Theresa Wey.

However, the exhibition tends not so much to narrate potential future scenarios, as to grasp the moment of our nymph stage with its works-in-progress. The question if we could reverse or shift it is not the matter of the project, which rather seeks to discern in young, but already frightening features the ripe body of the future reality. I’d envision here the second chapter that would wake us up from the stare at the mesmerizing images and suggest positive methodologies for resistance and change. And among them, decolonisation of nature should be prioritised – we have to acknowledge the rights of non-human species and embrace post-anthropocentric communality. I see a great move in the curatorial choice to include the documentary L’Hippocampe (1934) by Jean Painlevé into the show. The black and white study educates us on an amazing queer parenthood performed by seahorses and it truly inspires us to discover more about the evolutional strategies for survival. Strategies that can challenge our ignorance and make us learn from nature how to reimagine the future.

Jean Painlevé, L’Hippocampe (1934). Photo: Theresa Wey.

Stress Rehearsal
Curated by Malou Solfjeld

Artists: Mohamed Allam, Will Benedict, Daniel Mølholt Bülow, Gillian Brett, Rah Eleh, Rachel Fäth, Line Finderup Jensen mit Adnan Popovič, Juri Schaden & Parastu Gharabaghi, Lola Gonzàlez, Hanna Husberg & Laura McLean, Mohammed Laouli, Yein Lee, Elisabeth Molin, Jean Painlevé, Oliver Ressler, Clemens von Wedemeyer and Catherine Sarah Young.

29th of October, 2020 - 24th of April, 2021 at das Weisse Haus, Vienna.