Weights

The title of Judith Butler’s Bodies that Matter in German is Körper von Gewicht, the literal rendering being ‘Bodies of Weight.’ Matter is a much more precise double coding for what it hints at, yet the German translation still manages to carry both: von Gewicht extends beyond its literal meaning of weight, again into ‘full of meaning’ in the sense of gravity, heaviness, and sincerity, rather than merely as a physical fact. Bodies exist in and through systems of knowledge, not only in their social but also in their physical sense.The exhibition narrates along this line. Stories, biographies, and empathies “of gravity” leave their imprint on the body, direct it, most often beyond our grasp. What, in another knowledge system, is called the unconscious. “Weights” focuses on the connection of sculpture and sentience, it considers externalizations of these bodily states that push to make themselves seen and known. Corporeal imprints of history are set against structuralist remnants. Much like Roland Barthes’ method, one can decipher symbolism in these works, deconstructing aspects of their own medium, they focus on the ‘relatable’ subject: biography, friendship, singular experience, use humor and severity as strategy beyond their shared quality of being raumgreifend, spatially expansive. They upset and clarify within these most familiar, most difficult, full-of-shadow-parts of living.