Notes on Lightness / Notizen über das Leichte (13.11.2025–16.01.2026)
Participating artists:
Cecilia Bengolea, Nuotama Bodomo, Nina Davies, Leo Flügler, Suchan Kinoshita, Ariane Müller, Charlotte Posenenske, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Xing Danwen
realised by Ilse Lafer with the team of the hgb gallery
The exhibition "Notes on Lightness" examines the concept of lightness beyond common clichés. It does not merely thematise it as something weightless, floating or as a fetish of happiness that seems to promise a break from the omnipresent burdens. Rather, she understands becoming light as a resistant movement against a present that is not recognised as a political space of possibility and action in the repetition of the same old thing. This is why lightness comes into focus in times of upheaval, when stable structures and orders are eroding. Or when power regimes channel or break the desire for difference and change.
"Notes on Lightness" opens up a sketch-like space in which strategies of lightness are visualised as diverse "movement (inventions)" - comparable to a dancing body "that slips away from itself". On display are artistic works that utilise lightness as a transformative potential: These include improvised dance, the queering of body politics, the fabulous refusal to simply confirm world relations and the "relational modes" of micro-revolutionary moments of solidarity. A central concern is to counter the paradoxical appropriation of lightness by power structures such as financial capitalism, the economisation of nature or the digitality paradigm with another form of movement (discovery).
