Poster design by Kasper Pyndt.

Press Release, October 2021

Ana Gzirishvili, caner teker, Ella Bliss, Hito Steyerl, Jala Wahid, Javier Alvarez Sagredo, Keren Cytter, Kaspar Aavad, Malina Heinemann & Joseph Kadow, Nat Marcus, Rindon Johnson, Zoltan Ará.

Curated by Emil Grüner & Sam W. Harper.

“Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it,” writes Hannah Arendt, setting out a relationship between truth and fiction that is both liberatory and transcendent. Though firmly committed to the life of the intellectual mind, Arendt recognised the essential nature of creative language and narrative to comprehend the fullness of the human condition.

In BREATHING UNDER WATER – language is connected intimately with world-making. Words and stories are figured as materials for construction in a collective imagining of the world-as-different. The title is aptly borrowed from “The Thirteenth Voyage” of The Star Diaries by the Polish novelist Stanisław Lem, a science fictional vignette in which Soviet civic life is fictionalised as a subaquatic ideology, exemplified in the story as an enforcement of underwater living via the principle of “evolution by persuasion”.

In answer to such dystopic fiction, BREATHING UNDER WATER also draws inspiration from José Estebán Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia, posing queer visions for the future as a redress to oppressive regimes. In this text, Muñoz puts forward a notion of queer utopia, not as an attainable site, but as a set of practices that form around potential futures, and other, better and more compassionate ways of being in the world that break away from the flawed foundations of society.

BREATHING UNDER WATER is a joint project between several small presses, visual artists, and writers. It illustrates various ways in which art and literature can speak to the creation of new and alternate worlds, and advocates expansive notions of the world through the use of language-as-medium. Collaborative approaches to art practice are central to this exhibition, which fosters new constructions of language to enact forms of care. Via performance-readings, storytelling, and sculptural interpretations of texts, the exhibition presents a melting together of language and visual art to create a form of resistance that is applicable as a tool for world-building. Collaboration functions to bring different language forms together, creating new dialects that support community, connection, and self-representation. As a form of queer resistance, language is an important means of self-determination, and storytelling provides an open and pliant system of knowledge for both the inhabited and imagined world.

Text by Sarah Messerschmidt.

Opening: Friday the 22nd of October, 5-10pm. With L V J & Special Guest DJ. Light and set designs by: Vidø/Staal and Xara~Sylvester Vogelius. Facebook event.
Performance: Ana Gzirishvili, The Wooden Door. Saturday the 23rd of October, 3pm. Facebook event.
Reading: drift.5: Javier Alvarez Sagredo, Johan Bech Jespersen, Leviathan Van Furtile and Melanie Kitti. Sunday the 24th of October, 3 pm. Facebook event.
Exhibition period: 22-24 October 2021.

This event was made possible by AStA UdK Berlin, Villa Kultur, and Det Obelske Familiefond.