Introduction

Parallel to and in an open dialogue with the solo exhibition of the work of artist Anna Oppermann, the Württembergische Kunstverein Stuttgart will be showing “Übergangsräume – Potential Spaces”. The intended dialogue focuses less on formal aspects of artistic production than on their methodological approaches and interests.

“Übergangsräume – Potential Spaces” shows works by international artists which introduce the possible into the “inventories of reality”. It is not so much a particular subject that is emphasised but the approaches taken towards it. It is not so much the question as to how things really are or were which is relevant but rather how they could and could have been otherwise.

The invited artists dissect and analyse those “grand narratives” as modernity has established them in the forms of historiography, culture, the humanities and natural science and whose politics of identity and of representation, despite all post-modern evocations, continue to exert their influence.

With recourse to historical events, scientific discourses, cultural values or economic systems they deceive the narrative techniques of the same, by creating links between apparently mutually exclusive contexts and by producing a surplus of potential fields of reference. Their movements between reality and fiction as well as between various times, disciplines and perspectives do not follow linear but rather all directions simultaneously: anticipating and reversing, repeating and shifting. Interpretation becomes an open process in which, as a co-producer of meaning, the observer is consciously challenged.

Thus, the exhibition emphasises artistic practices which bring into play complexity in the sense of uncertainty, contradiction, unclearness or inconstancy: not intended as a threat but as potential, not merely constrained to the terrain of art but also as an incursion into other domains.