Luis Kürschner & Patryk Kujawa

Kestner Gesellschaft
Hanover, Germany
March 4 – June 4, 2023

Curated by Adam Budak & Robert Knoke

[ɡəˈzɛlʃaft] is a parasitic exhibition of ephemeral character that pursues a strategy of unexpected appearance and disruption as a mode of operation. It fantasizes about what would happen if a hacking attack on the Kestner Gesellschaft took place. Through several parasitic interventions, an anonymous entity infects the hardware of the building with a new operating system – a software of love and tenderness which installs itself in the physical spaces.

The starting point is the infrastructure of the building and its internal procedures. The show infuses the hidden and forgotten spaces of the institution with fictions. It penetrates its basement and attic, its ventilation, announcement and ticketing system. Since the building’s organs are not accessible to the public, they harbor a certain mystery which the exhibition takes as a potential for a quasi-filmic narration. The secrets these spaces keep could be part of the cryptic plan prepared by the parasitic entity.

Two polyphonic sound installations welcome the visitor outside. The windows of the basement become a membrane for sound waves, sending encoded messages down the street. At the princess window blows the air of love that spreads love in the air. Is this evidence that the tower became a host to something? At least that‘s what the surveillance cameras seem to be fantasizing about.

The parasite also infests the inner organs of the exhibition house. In the transitory spaces, the bookstore, the staircase, cloakroom and toilet, it expresses itself in tenderly penetrating messages heard through air outlets and resonating materials. Signs around the building seem to trace some brief moments of the parasitic existence. On the screens of ticket sales it seizes a fleeting moment of visibility and sabotages the usual information. For a blink of an eye, it reveals its face to us, without becoming fully graspable.

The multimedia exhibition playfully questions the preconditions of our communication devices and imagines alternative ways of how to communicate as a society in the digital age. Through a series of perspectives both poetic and prosaic, fictional and scientific, humane and anti-anthropogenic, the show wrestles with subtle acts of love and tenderness.