JUN 15, 2019 - AUG 18, 2019
To picture the stranger, an intruder, a person seeking refuge or asylum presents a contradiction. As soon as it is possible to know by looking at a picture that someone is a stranger, their difference becomes categorical, a fact of their existence. To define someone in this way damages their humanity because it is based on that which they do not belong rather than that which they are.
“L’Intrus REDUX” takes Jean-Luc Nancy’s eponymous book (L’Intrus) as a point of departure. Nancy describes the one who is intruding as a transplanted heart. His body needs the stranger but it is also in danger of rejecting that stranger and, as a consequence, of dying. “L’Intrus REDUX” presents artists who lean in the direction Nancy indicates: rather than trying to simply picture the stranger, their work depicts a relation to the stranger as an intimate and vital interdependence.
The exhibition at the Westfälischer Kunstverein can be regarded as one part of a diptych with another exhibition by Nel Aerts being simultaneously presented at the Kunsthalle Lingen – both shows have been developed in close collaboration and constitute the artist’s first institutional solo shows in Germany.
