17 Jul 2015

'Invisible Manoeuvres' at Galerie Wedding - Raum für zeitgenössische Kunst, Berlin

Invisible Manoeuvres –
Reserves of Interpretation and Regions of Definition
24.07.2015 – 29.08.2015


Anna Artaker and Meike S. Gleim, Silvia Beck, Burak Delier, Francis Hunger, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Susan Schuppli, Juliane Zelwies

Although both visibility and invisibility have always been regulated, the issue of shifting relationships of regulatory technologies and their fields of application is increasingly apparent. This exhibition investigates political agendas which are increasingly shifting into secret, informal domains and questions the strategies and legitimations employed in the process. Along with mass surveillance, policies of secrecy reveal themselves in the forthcoming trade agreement, or informal practices such as lobbying, shadow exchanges and shadow banks. In this context, invisibility becomes a privilege which guarantees greater room to manoeuvre for an economised politics, compounded by bio-political control and digital surveillance.

One characteristic of these policies of secrecy is that workers' representatives no longer participate in their negotiation, while civil rights are invalidated in the name of the economy or security. Has the invisible hand of the market strayed into politics here, and not just as metaphor? The invisible hand represents the non-visible objective of productivity and acquisition, a sort of side effect which is meant to indirectly and aically serve the common good (Adam Smith). According to this interpretation, the invisible hand of the market doesn't refer to the self-regulation of the market – which, as we have seen time and time again, doesn't exist – rather a higher objective which is visible to a greater or lesser extent. This mechanism refers to the operating modes of ideology: the actual objective remains secret.

Today, at any rate, it is no longer the promotion of the common good which is concealed, rather its non-promotion. The invisible hand has transformed into a variety of invisible manoeuvres. For decades, the staging of visibility and representation has been preached as a necessary strategy of self-exploitation. Visibility was declared a value, virtual presence a necessary instrument in the quest for realness – paradoxically. On the other hand, the NSA affair has demonstrated that the original objective of the World Wide Web, the free digital transfer of knowledge and exchange of information, has been penetrated by economisation and surveillance. The potential of virtual presence and communication is co-opted by acquisition processes, through the appropriation of data. The non-visible objective is monitoring and exploitation, which like Smith's common good was supposed to come about through the promotion of self-interest.

The cards are being reshuffled in the struggle for visibility and invisibility, and this has consequences for civil rights and democracy. The artists' works investigate categories of interpretive sovereignty and power of definition in the context of aesthetic, ideological and technological domains and questions the aesthetic manoeuvres by which classification systems are broken down. To what extent are aesthetic practices themselves subject to these mechanisms?

Dérive / City Walk: 25.07.2015, 11am
The artist Francis Hunger (www.irmielin.org) invites to join to a Database - Dérive in the vicinity of the art space. The intention is to explore the surrounding area for signs of databases to document these and to acquire a strategy of sensing databases in everyday life. Please bring your camera, smartphone or pen and paper.
We ask for advance reservation with Julia Zieger: presse@galeriewedding.de

Meeting point: Galerie Wedding – Raum für zeitgenössische Kunst
Müllerstraße 146 - 147
13353 Berlin