Wo*man*kind
Asef–Burckhardt, Elisa Azevedo, Mit Borrás, Stella Geppert, Thorsten Alexander Kasper, Melissa Steckbauer and Luo Yang
curated by Stephan Klee
Kindred Spirit Lisbon hosts frontviews Berlin
opening hours
16 Mar – 22 April 2025
Tue – Fri 2 – 6 pm
and Sat by personal appointment
location
Kindred Spirit
Rua da Boavista 54
P – 1200–068 Lisbon
social media
IG @frontviews_
@haunt_berlin
This project is profoundly supported by Kindred Spririt. It´s also made possible with the initiative of the whole collective.
Programme
Vernissage
Sam 15 Mar 6:30 – 9 pm
Finissage
Tue 22 Apr 4 – 6 pm
„May you live in interesting times“ * – Indeed. It's very hard to doubt it, we are living in interesting times these years. The breakdown of the two piles of globalised, multilateral trading in 2001, the breakdown of the digitalised finance markets in 2008, and the breakdown of an international peace order latest with the reelection of an orange bully as chief in command of the greatest army of the world are quite interesting, but not exciting at all. It’s a cascade, a downfall of any utopian agenda of our current civilisation – and this is just a central Western view of the actual development.
So looking around inside the shelter during the storm outside, taking a breath – we ask ourselves what might be the core foundation of our living? What is the crucial, primary base to start from? Where do we gain our power to go on? Where do we see the reasons to live fostering? Where can we let ourselves fall, without being afraid of the collusion at the ground?
The group exhibition Wo*man*kind offers an attempt to respond to these questions by setting the focus on the „between of you and me". The selection of artists and artworks here shows human beings close to each other in very open, private, and sometimes even intimate moments. The conceived pieces basically depict close–ups of faces, bodies, shared moments, and memories and therefore open access to the experiences of intense longing, keeping close and trust. While doing so, they lay bare inner relations between lovers, partners, and family and speak about the fundaments in the life of almost every individual. Fundaments that a lot of people put their trust in, fundaments that give security, hope, strength, and joy, fundaments that also can be dismantled from time to time, but this remains for another chapter.
In general, this is an exhibition dedicated to desire, tenderness, empathy, the love between wo*men*child as the main inducements behind the great social rhizome, that still holds so many of us on the board of living, that shelters us from deep harm. The genuine seed, for this rhizome of breathing attraction is the final inconceivability of the beauty of the other, the vivid vis–à–vis of this world. Or like Timothy Morton puts it: „The beauty experience is telling you that this thing, this thing I can see right there is ungraspable, it’s totally vivid, I can’t get a grip on it …“ He also proclaims: „There needs to be this ambiguous space between art and kitsch, beauty and disgust. A shifting world, a world of love, of philos** The art collective frontviews had the slight sensation, that these times might be the right one for this show.
Stephan Klee
* Chinese curse
** Timothy Morton „All Art is ecological“, p. 14 and p.17, Penguin Books, 2018
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