Liminal Creatures

The participants in the group exhibition "Liminal Creatures" deal with rituals, ceremonies and cultural memory. The artists Lena-Elise Aicher, Maximilian Arnold, Dominika Bednarsky, Karin Ferrari, Bernhard Garnicnig, Gregory Hari, Stefanie Kägi, Marianne Mueller and Selina Reiterer show works using a wide variety of techniques and media. Rituals are symbolic actions. They enable to deal with basic questions of human existence, of interpersonal relationships and community, the striving for security and order, the knowledge of one's own mortality or that belief in a transcendent reality. Also through rituals man will during aware of a ceremonial gesture. In the last decades and especially in the last two years, a identify of paradigm shift in the definition of traditional rites: digitization supports meditation via online courses, extended individualization processes allow diverse forms of the term "ritual" itself and globalized concepts of the world are always mixed up with traditional cultural memories. Liminal Creatures is an exploration of this shift, a throwback, a preview. What forms of reflection, what practices and approaches art uses today to represent to secure and preserve hold and definition? Where do you draw the line today between everyday routines and ritual? What tools and techniques can be used? How does a mere individual gesture become a ritual art practice? Do these gestures preserve communality? Liminal Creatures reflects on the idea of ​​"threshold": threshold in the sense of transition from everyday to ritual. In anthropology, liminality is precisely the threshold area that quality of ambiguity and disorientation. At this ambiguous border participants in a ritual are in transition from previous forms of structuring of their identity or community to a transformed consciousness, which in the procedure of rite is completed. Based on this assumption, Liminal Creatures wants the nine invited artists determine in their cross-disciplinary works, novel or vanishing practices. Ritual or oath is explored for itself. Universal practices of community are critically questioned or tries to delimited from existing norms. The various positions are intended to reflect custom, rite and power of repetition of familiar practices, expand and apply millennia-old techniques to the present, compare and translate.