The group exhibition “at daybreak” attracts connections between methods of picture manufacturing and the social and political work that goes into imagining alternate options to what the late Cuban American thinker José Esteban Muñoz known as our “toxic and bancrupt” current. The present seeks to specific a way of artwork’s utopian horizon—a generative house of need, experimentation, and queer relationality aligned with what he described as “ecstatic time.”

The thirty works on view vary from efficiency movies, movie, images, video sculptures, and Land artwork documentation to moving-image installations and poetry. Historic works foregrounding materiality and course of by Nancy Holt (and Holt with Robert Smithson), Joan Jonas, Mary Lucier, and Anthony McCall connect with the formal and conceptual issues of newer items by artists together with Heike Baranowsky, Rosa Barba, Carol Bove, and Jeppe Hein. These are set in dialogue with questions of need and id in works by the collective DIS, Barbara Hammer, and Wolfgang Tillmans, in addition to in A.Okay. Burns and A.L. Steiner’s sixty-nine-minute ode to queer sexuality in Neighborhood Motion Middle (2010). In what would be the greatest European presentation of the artist’s work to this point, 4 massive video installations by Jacolby Satterwhite fuse the artist’s personal efficiency follow with a CGI dreamscape to discover queer ritual and the political potential of software program. Two video sculptures by Nam June Paik could be seen as precursors to Satterwhite’s animated picture overload.

The present additionally contains an replace of the studying room by Cassandra Press put in at JSC Berlin since 2021, a discursive house during which guests can delve into Black scholarship on topics corresponding to double consciousness, performativity, and reparations. Audio recordings of poems from Treasured Okoyomon are nestled into the constructing’s exterior, whereas Cauleen Smith contributes not solely a video but additionally an set up, Sky Be taught Sky (2022), turning the constructing right into a durational paintings. Like that of the exhibition, the set up’s title is borrowed from a saying by Alice Coltrane, identified in her non secular life as Swamini Turiyasangitananda: “At daybreak, sit on the toes of motion. At midday, be on the hand of may. At eventide, be so huge that sky will be taught sky.”

How and the place will we find the utopian in on a regular basis life and in artwork? Why is it necessary to maintain envisioning different methods of being, different temporalities, different areas, even when it appears naïve to take action contemplating the violence that defines the established order? “at daybreak” presents examples of how artists carve out non secular, psychological, and bodily enclaves that decision for “one thing else, one thing higher, one thing dawning.”

at JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION, Berlin
till December 4, 2022