1 HIT, Einladungskarte / invite "Bad Readings", 23.10–29.11.2020 am / at Badischer Kunstverein Karlsruhe, Bild von / image by Mathias Lempart und / and Severin Geißler, BAD READINGS, digitale Collage / digital collage, Buchstaben 3D-gedruckt / letters 3D-printed: Byron Kalomamas, Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe 2020
2 HIT, Einladungskarte / invite Bad Readings, 23.10–29.11.2020 am / at Badischer Kunstverein Karlsruhe, Textseite, Foto von / Images by Bruno Jacoby
Bad Reading Group: Jandra Böttger, Elio J Carranza, Severin Geißler, Diane Hillebrand, Bruno Jacoby, Cécile Kobel, Mathias Lempart, Arootin Mirzakhani, Esther Poppe, Johanna Schäfer, Tatjana Stürmer, Yana Tsegay
Student: Diane Hillebrand
Bad Readings shows manifestations of affective and physical modes of exhibition experience that emerged during a workshop convened by Diane Hillebrand at Badischer Kunstverein in August 2020. Moving away from standardised and normalising patterns of reception, the Bad Reading Group approached the exhibition If It's For The People, It Needs To Be Beautiful, She Said by artist Jeremiah Day, which was on show at the Kunstverein during the first half of the year.
A stutter, an absurd interpretation, the feeling of boredom when reading a canonical text - "At one time or another, everyone has been a bad reader", writes Tyler Bradway. The exhibition project adapts his affect-based and queer literary-critical method and understands exhibits, visitor bodies, buildings, space, texts and graphics as components of a curatorial "text". In this way, exhibitions can be scrutinised for their legibility and new, illegitimate modes of reading can be tried out. The aim is to reinterpret these transgressions as insights, to produce apt misunderstandings and performative omissions and to manifest these spatially, mentally and physically in order to allow the grammar of the curatorial to enter into a potentially productive crisis.
Using (sceno)graphic, artistic and representational means, Bad Readings undertakes a polyphonic critique and citation-like repetition of Jeremiah Day's exhibition, the artistic practice on display and its curatorial mediation. The most diverse reading experiences of the exhibition are expressed in letters written by the Bad Reading Group during their reading of the exhibition. On the one hand, these letters thematise structural problems of exhibition making; on the other hand, they address details of the concretely experienced exhibition. The letter form encompasses personal experiences, anticipates critical distance, is unobjective, intimate or aggressive. It is opposed to exhibition criticism, also because the sender always puts his/her own position up for discussion in the letter.
The exhibition will be open from 18:00 on the opening day. The welcome by Diane Hillebrand will take place at 19:00, followed by a foreword by Cécile Kobel and a speech by Arootin Mirzakhani. At 21:00 there will be a performance by Yana Tsegay in the exhibition. Please register for this at info@badischer-kunstverein.de.
Concept & scenography: Diane Hillebrand
A diploma project in the exhibition design and scenography department of the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design in co-operation with the Badischer Kunstverein