Calendar

Venue:
Künstlerhaus, Gesellschaft bildender Künstlerinnen und Künstler Österreichs
Karlsplatz 5
1010 Wien


Curated by Ana Hoffner ex-Prvulovic*After Cheryl Harris
In her 1992 text "Whiteness as Property", the jurist Cheryl Harris writes about the formation of property relations along racist categories. Racism has not only forced black people into dispossession, but also defined property itself as a right accessible only to whites. What Harris addresses for the context of the US has a prehistory in older conceptions of the liberal subject. As the owner of oneself, the liberal subject is not only involved in the production of race, but is also significantly shaped by an urge to take possession. Today's liberal and racist relationship to objects and the process of reification must also be thought of against the background of so-called 'possessive individualism'. For the making of objects cannot be decoupled from racialised questions of ownership - things only become what they are through the possibility of their capitalist appropriation and their circulation as commodities.
The exhibition project WHITENESS AS PROPERTY attempts to question property relations permeated by racism through their aesthetic dimension. It shows artistic strategies as decisive instruments in the confrontation with possessive individualism and investigates whether the art field can serve as a source of alternative models of a possessive subject/object relationship that is at the same time critical of racism. The focus of the exhibition is on critical aesthetic practices that are developed in relation to property relations, things and materials and question the self-evidence of the historical and present ownership of subjects and objects as always already racialised. On the one hand, artistic practice has an exploratory effect by investigating racialised property relations; on the other hand, it implicitly develops techniques that show how subjects lose their sovereignty in the treatment of objects, acquire a life of their own and cannot be transformed into things. What is decisive for these practices is that they take into account the affective effect of possession without romanticising the lack of possession. Rather, artistic practice acts as a field of experimentation in which the multi-layered character of possession first becomes visible: we are often inevitably in possession of ourselves and at the same time possessive of others. Can we formulate an ethical dimension of ownership, one that allows us to define a form of subjectivation that is not based on the right to own (i.e. on the normative effect of ownership), but that sharpens our perception of collectivity and relational networks as the basis of ownership, and thus also actively combats racism?
The Artistic Research Conference accompanying the exhibition WHITENESS AS PROPERTY is dedicated to the specific knowledge of the artists participating in the exhibition. As a symposium of artistic research, the event provides the opportunity for an in-depth exploration of ownership individualism and racialised property relations from the perspective of aesthetic production. On two consecutive days, artists will present their practices and discuss them with a broad public.Curated by Ana Hoffner ex-Prvulovic*Curated by Ana Hoffner ex-Prvulovic*