artists

Jos De Gruyter and Harald Thys

Jos De Gruyter, 1965, Geel, BE. Harald Thys, 1966, Wilrijk, BE They live in Brussels, BE

Untitled, 2008 hd Video, 20’ sculptures drawings

TRENTO

For almost 20 years, Jos De Gruyter and Harald Thys have collaborated to produce a highly idiosyncratic body of videos and films, most of which have somber undertones and address unadorned human conditions rather than following a plot. Driven by an exploration of the existential, these films conjure up dramatic, surreal situations and combine a representation of basic human emotions and behavior with paradoxes. Their aesthetic vocabulary draws both on the natural awkwardness of their untrained actors and on the glazed expressions of asylum patients, while mixing these to create a strange and sometimes macabre theatre of the absurd.
For Manifesta 7, De Gruyter and Thys have created a film inspired by the world of clay modeling. The “hobby world” intentionally positions itself at a distance from the real world, pursuing its repetitive activities in attics, basements or special workshops. Though practiced in a group, these activities remain primarily autistic and emphasize a state of fundamental, tragic loneliness. The finished products seldom leave the spaces in which they were created, ending up in cabinets, boxes or on dusty shelves. The video follows a group of shut-away hobbyists who, under the leadership of a tyrant, submit to ongoing work on their miserable creations.

Location

TRENTO

ANSELM FRANKE/HILA PELEG: "THE SOUL (or, Much Trouble in the Transportation of Souls)"

PALAZZO DELLE POSTE, VIA S.S. TRINITA’ 27, I-38100 TRENTO, ITALY

Palazzo_delle_poste-foto_giovanni_cavulli__archivio_ufficio_stampa_pat

This project proposes to examine today’s Europe not as an expanding geopolitical entity but in regard to the engineering of its psyche or soul. Trento, the city of the historic Council of Trent and of this part of Manifesta 7, provides the immediate background for the project.
As an archeology of reversals between inside and outside, self and other, individual and collective, The Soul follows the historical turning-inwards of the expansionist boundaries of European modernity and suggests that the production, mobilization, and representation of the inner self is a final frontier, a last outside.
Here the soul is not understood or treated as fact but as a cultural object, an allegory for social relations shaped by ideas and techniques of power. Much like the “discovery” of a continent, these techniques have produced and invented an entity they declared to map objectively. And yet this entity, the psyche—if only as the difference between material and immaterial, body and mind, object and subject—has never been entirely contained by positivist science. Its properties (emotion, memory, imagination, fantasy, self-consciousness) remain haunted by its own otherness, a minefield of displacements.
It was in Trento that the catholic doctrine of the relation between the soul and representation was articulated some five hundred years ago. And it was here that the rules for Christian confession were expanded to include purely projective, imaginary deeds and thoughts, thus marking an important step in the construction of the modern European self: the policing and self-policing of the interior.
This history unfolds in the exhibition as a set of miniature museums, which sketch possible, alternative, or incomplete histories of the psyche and the soul. These are study displays that investigate the embodiment of power in its affective and cognitive dimensions, experiment with the tradition of the museum, and bring into focus the paradoxes of a “European normality”, the relation between soul and image, nonphonetic pedagogy, structures of feelings, the logic of desires, psychological personality tests, and the history of antipsychiatry.
Next to this series of speculative museums, The Soul brings together recent and specially commissioned works by over thirty artists working in Europe and elsewhere. Some contributions engage with the site of the exhibition and its regional, political, and historical context. Others take the form of “deep” historical research, confronting the mythical contents of European history with the technologies of power and the power of cultural technologies. The entire exhibition is a search for languages capable of identifying and articulating new forms of exclusion and possibilities for reversing forms of social control.
Anselm Franke/Hila Peleg
THE SOUL
(or, Much Trouble in the Transportation of Souls)
CONTRIBUTORS
Nader Ahriman, Maria Thereza Alves / Jimmie Durham / Michael Taussig, Tamy Ben-Tor, Attila Bruni, Beth Campbell, Fabio Campolongo, Marcus Coates, Peter Coffin, Keren Cytter, Jos De Gruyter / Harald Thys, Massimiliano & Gianluca De Serio, Brigid Doherty, Omer Fast, Peter Friedl, Stefano Graziani, Tom Holert / Claudia Honecker, Karl Holmqvist, Hannah Hurtzig, Joachim Koester, Andree Korpys / Markus Löffler, Kuehn Malvezzi, Daria Martin, Angela Melitopoulos, Xisco Mensua, Valérie Mréjen, Rabih Mroué, Andreas Müller, Sina Najafi / Christopher Turner, Rosalind Nashashibi, Luigi Ontani, Ria Pacquée, Bernd Ribbeck, Pietro Roccasalva, Roee Rosen, Christoph Ruckhäberle, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Florian Schneider, Eyal Sivan, Josef Strau, Javier Tellez, Althea Thauberger, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, Barbara Visser, Klaus Weber,
Eyal Weizman
Texts in Pubblication:
Franco Berardi, Brigid Doherty, Tom Holert, Maurizio Lazzarato, Eva Meyer, Avi Pitchon, Renata Salecl, Michael Taussig, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, Eyal Weizman, et al.