Talks
Viktor Neumann
Sick Times
The social construction of ‘sickness’ has been decisive for the development of Modernity, specifically in its contributions to the relation between production and reproduction, the violent denial of bodily autonomy and agency to specific subjects in society and/or entire groups, and to the visual repertoire of pathology and deviancy. Today, ‘sickness’ continues to serve as a violent category to justify systemic oppression. Yet, the term has been reclaimed as tool of self-empowerment by many considered fragile, weak, or inefficient and therefore ‘less valuable’, allowing to destabilize and transform the dominant conceptions of health, productivity, normalcy, and ability.
The talk presents a number of artistic and curatorial practices that rethink resistance from the perspective of those rendered weak, deviant, or non-compliant, exploring amongst others: strategies of visibility, invisibility, and opacity and the generating of visual languages beyond representational politics; critical care work and the relations between autonomy and dependency; the politics of desire the poetics of intimacy. The presentation further examines strategies that unsettle the chrono-normative logics subjugated to the demands of profitability and proficiency and, ultimately, emphasizes alliances and solidarity beyond time, space and vulnerabilities.
Viktor Neumann (born 1985 in Berlin, Germany) has curated exhibitions and projects for institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Bildmuseet Umeå, Kunstmuseum Bonn, National Centre for Contemporary Arts in Yekaterinburg, The Kitchen in New York, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart and Gdańsk City Gallery. He was Curatorial Assistant for documenta 14 Public Programmes, Assistant Curator for the 3rd Moscow International Biennale for Young Art and a Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. Recently, he was co-curator of the Bergen Assembly 2019 and co-curator of the transnational project Parliament of Bodies. Currently, he is co-curating a three-parted exhibition series at the Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart over the course of 2020 and, together with Fanny Hauser, has been awarded the *Kurator stipend 2019/20 by the Gebert Stiftung für Kultur, co-curating five exhibitions in 2020 in the city of Rapperswil.