“A Portrait in Fragments” is a mirrored image on biographical areas, reminiscence, and the bodily and immaterial traces that the self leaves behind on the earth. The group exhibition explores the plurality, multifacetedness, and porosity of biographical expertise, which unfolds in moments of introspection and self-observation, but additionally within the encounter with exterior (and imagined) worlds and with others. It’s this double motion—between intimacy and externalization, and between the gaze unto oneself and the gaze unto (fictional) others—that’s repeatedly noticed and brought up within the exhibition. The psychoanalytic idea of extimacy refers on the one hand to the intimacy of what’s exterior, overseas, and non-identical to us, and on the opposite to the need of the inside self to externalize, expose, and carry out itself within the exterior world. The exhibited works thus find the biographical somewhere else: at occasions it’s present in psychic depth and imagined landscapes, at others on the floor and within the trivial—in a bit of clothes, a latex object, a bag, or an condominium key. All through the exhibition, sexuality and the erotic additional emerge as moments of intensive externalization and opening up of the self.

The biographical has a unique presence and depth throughout “A Portrait in Fragments”: a number of the exhibited works unfold within the fragmentary, small, and incidental, and in snapshots and remnants of a private life that confront us with moments of absence and vacancy. What stays are traces pointing to absent characters, and to the coordinates of a life whose spirit can nonetheless be felt and hangs throughout the rooms of the Kunstverein like a reminiscence. And there are different works that fairly search presence and make current, in search of a efficiency and a staging of the self. Extra panoramic and intensive than fragmentary, these stagings and levels permit actual and imaginary characters to come across each other and the opportunity of a fictional plot and a dialogue to emerge, dissolving the bounds of biographical time and area.

In “A Portrait in Fragments,” a shared need might be felt for the montage and remedy of (fictional) biographical materials, which is photographed, collaged, uncovered, carried out, and re-performed. The method of montage thus turns into a chance to view this materials otherwise, to write down a brand new script, and to create connections and cuts which can be invisible, unconscious, hid, latent, and fascinating. It’s at this threshold between biography and fiction that the pictures, objects, and diorama within the exhibition tackle lives of their very own, as they start to turn into narrative scripts for a potential biography—producing new openings, views, and wishes.

Curated by
Kathrin Bentele

Collaborating artists:
Patricia L. Boyd, Moyra Davey, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Hervé Guibert, Pope.L, Monica Majoli, Maggie Lee

at Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf
till September 22, 2024