Curatorial Walk-through and Artist Talk with Bernadette Anzengruber

A group exhibition exploring the boundaries of intimacy in the age of global connections

Is This Intimacy? is an exploration of intimacy in our hypermediated present through its ambiguity and its diversity. The exhibition emerges from the exchanges, desires and experiences of a group of millennial artists and curators from across the globe. Is This Intimacy? borrows its title from a meme that circulated heavily online in 2018, whose original image features the protagonist of a 1990s Japanese anime TV series, The Brave Fighter of Sun Fighbird, an android who mistakes a butterfly for a pigeon, asking himself ‘Is this a pigeon?’

Transformed into a viral meme that turned the original question into a thousand others, (‘Is this a therapist?’ / ‘Is this a cure to my lifelong depression?’/ ‘Is this hell?’ ‘Is this my life?’ / ‘Is this a hacker?’) the image and its transformations illustrate a viral, current state of emotional confusion globally.

How will future art historians treat memes? Probably similar to letters and soap boxes of eras bygone. A subtle reference to the seminal 1956 exhibition This Is Tomorrow, which marked the beginning of late Western capitalism through its relationship to pop culture, Is this Intimacy? is an exercise in translation of some of its key concerns and consequences into the era of global hypercommunication.

Understanding translation as “the ultimate intimate act”, as Gayatri Spivak states in “The Politics of Translation”, the exhibition explores how we produce, seek, or avoid intimacy through language, flows of affect, communicational modes, capital, love, heritage, and technology. Rather than making monolithic claims, it presents a collage of ideas (artworks, performances, talks, and texts) that investigate the tensions and challenges that we face in our relations today, as well as our relationship to an ambivalent affective and political environment. How do we form intimate moments with ourselves and others? How do we create distance or intimacy with our personal histories, and how do we create new intimate publics in an environment dominated by affective capital and ‘successful’ images of public intimacy?

In short,

Is This Intimacy?

Artists: Alfredo Ledesma Quintana, Anna Lerchbaumer, Anne-Clara Stahl, Bernadette Anzengruber, Darja Shatalova, Eva Rybářová, Laura Stoll, Maximiliane L. Armann, Mona Radziabari, Paula Flores, Veronika Abigail Beringer.

Curators: Anna-Mikaela Ekstrand, Carlota Mir, Chiarina Chen, Katrina Longo, Lina Romanukha, Valerie Schiller.

Curatorial supervision and guidance: Anamarija Batista(Betty Blue)
Production assistance: Eva Kovac, Jana Dolecki, Nevena Jankovic

Is This Intimacy? is organized by BLOCKFREI, in cooperation with Die Angewandte (University of Applied Arts Vienna).