Invisible Until It's Broken

Do structural problems only become visible when those very structures start to crack? For whom are glass ceilings transparent? Who stares at concrete while looking up? Based on the controversial idea that infrastructures only become visible when they break, the group exhibition Invisible Until It‘s Broken brings together eight spatially expansive installations. With their poetic-political, sometimes playfully humorous perspectives, the artists put their fingers right in the wound. Cracks in social and material infrastructures become palpable. Annelies Kamen’s installation consists of ceramic buckets, which catch drops of water that fall from the seemingly dilapidated ceiling of the foyer. Only at second glance does the installation Fountain (Bad Landlord) (2022) reveal itself as a precise staging. Winnie Herbstein‘s architectural video installation Dampbusters (19 min., 2021) extends into the foyer from the neighbouring exhibition space. Questions about affordable housing, gentrification, and solidarity are negotiated in the film of the same name, which is shown within a metal installation. Pennie Key‘s game-installation Socks Off! (2021) addresses the power dynamics between genders in relation to bodies and their representation. The playful characteristics of the fights allow insights into intimate rivalries. Opposite the foam mats, which act both as installation and wrestling stage, are Veronika Hapchenko‘s surreal paintings. These large scale paintings reflect et al. on the importance of female-read bodies to the propaganda of the former Soviet Union. When Selma Selman builds her mother A Pink Room of Her Own (2020) or Rajyashri Goody asks Does Manu Hesitate To Eat With You? (2022), everyday gestures effortlessly become personal expressions of self-empowerment. The works of the two artists invite us to reflect on the high price that marginalized communities worldwide pay for (social) infrastructures to remain invisible for a privileged minority. Most recently, the Covid pandemic has accelerated the inequal distribution of unpaid care work between the genders. Down an unsettlingly narrow staircase, we enter the large basement where Yun Choi‘s three-channel video installation Hanaco and Mr. Kimchi etc. playback (30 min., 2017) can be experienced. Yun Choi invites us to escape the space-time continuum into a collective subconscious. Pop cultural references make her images appear familiar, but only at first glance. Cana Bilir-Meier‘s film This makes me want to predict the past (16 min., 2019), shot on Super 8, can be seen in the laboratorium. The short film portrays a group of youths with a migration background in the Olympia shopping center in Munich, where nine young people were murdered in a racist attack in 2016. At the lowest point of the cellar you will find Annelies Kamen‘s self-portrait Mary Jane‘s Mishap (2022). The installation consists of a smoking pair of Doc Martens. It inevitably triggers associations with structural change in the Ruhr area. Before the shoes gained cult status in various subcultures in the 1960s, they were a popular work shoe among labourers in Great Britain. In the works of these artists, the boundaries between private and political, between the individual and the collective, become blurred. They demand our involvement as viewers precisely because of their autobiographical references. Most of the works are shown for the first time in Germany as part of the exhibition Invisible Until It‘s Broken.