Stephen Wright
Escapologies

Increasingly, practitioners from all fields of human activity are seeking exit strategies – instead of seeking more thorough integration. Voter abstention in elections; the flight from political parties and their organs of representation; the quest for anonymity and multitudinity; leaving academic disciplines in pursuit of more extradisciplinary modes of knowledge exchange; repurposing skills in parallel proto-institutional structures, often better equipped than their official variants. Even in the mainstream art world, an increasing number of artists are simply dropping out – deliberately evading its all-encompassing attention economy and politically enfeebling prescriptions of visibility.

Withdrawal from ideological and institutional capture has a history, but the current forms of offensive retreat suggest that it is more about eluding ontological capture - escaping assignment to a given ontology – as art. Above and beyond the question of “why“ one might seek to escape, and “from what“ exactly and “where to“, is the question of “how“.

“Escapologies” brings together a polymorphous bloc of escapees (and of those who – having contemplated escape – have decided on a self-conscious pursuit of inclusion) to examine an array of escapological strategies which they have implemented, observed or contested.

Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Stephen Wright
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Charles Esche
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Federico Geller
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: André Éric Létourneau
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Scott Rigby
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Gregory Sholette
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Dmitry Vilensky
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Chto Delat
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Florian Schneider