Notes on Lightness / Notizen über das Leichte
Exhibition with artist talks and a seminar
14.11.2025–24.01.2026
With works by: Cecilia Bengolea, Nuotama Bodomo, Nina Davies, Leo Flügler, Suchan Kinoshita, Ariane Müller, Charlotte Posenenske, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Xing Danwen
Opening: Thu 13.11.2025, 6 p.m.
The exhibition “Notes on Lightness“ examines the concept of lightness beyond the usual 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. Lightness therefore 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 here 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).
The gallery of the Academy of Fine Art sees itself as a membrane between the interior and exterior of the institution. The gallery's aim is to supplement and extend both the teaching contents and practices of the various departments as well as making a contribution to current inquiries in the arts, thereby establishing connections between internal and external discussions and - being situated in the centre of the academy - offering a social and discursive place for carrying out such debates. In the framework of the academy's specific capabilities, the gallery affords students, lecturers, invited artists, curators and theoreticians an experimental and reflective form of exhibition practice that can incorporate, beyond the presentations themselves, the active involvement with the exhibition and the reworking and reformulating discursive material.