OFLUXO
STERNENBEUTEL
Andrej Auch, Maria Braune, Jakob Gilg, Stefan Holzmair, Laura Leppert, Christine Liebich, Lilian Robl, Neringa Vasiliauskaite, Milena Wojhan
Curated by Jakob Gilg
At Braun-Falco gallery, Munich, Germany
January 14 — February 24, 2022
Photography by Milena Wojhan
We’ve heard it, we’ve all heard all about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news. And yet old. Before-once you think about it, surely long before-the weapon, a late, luxurious, superfluous tool; long before the useful knife and ax; right along with the indispensable whacker, grinder, and digger, for what’s the use of digging up a lot of potatoes if you have nothing to lug the ones you can’t eat home in – with or before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home. It makes sense to me.
I am an adherent of what Fisher calls the Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution.
(…) It is the story that makes the difference. It is the story that hid my humanity from me, the story the mammoth hunters told about bashing, thrusting, raping, killing, about the Hero. The wonderful, poisonous story of Botulism. The killer story.
It sometimes seems that that story is approaching its end. Lest there be no more telling of stories at all, some of us out here in the wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we’d better start telling another one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one’s finished. Maybe.
— The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula K. LeGuin
Stories, too, are vessels – with their own architecture, ostentatious halls and dusty cellars, their repeated patterns and their edges that enclose and make visible some, but simulteneously exclude many narrators along with their narratives. Putting the cultural-historical focus on protective and preserving objects and forms can change the way we tell stories. Heroic epics of great wars and supposed victories fought with sword and “reason” represent only part of our reality; we want to turn towards those human and more-than-human narratives lying in the shadows, to collect them, salvage them, and carry them with us, far away from imperial avenues.
Following these alternative ideas, and testing how we can think past, present and future differently and weave fictions fractally and playfully as in alchemical processes, the artists Andrej Auch, Maria Braune, Jakob Gilg, Stefan Holzmair, Laura Leppert, Christine Liebich, Lilian Robl, Neringa Vasiliauskaitė and Milena Wojhan show their works in the exhibition Sternenbeutel, on view from January 13, 2022 at Galerie Braun-Falco.
All the artists and their works, even if they differ in their approach, focus or use of materials, are united by their ability to take us on a journey without definite beginning or end, embarking on a route rich with contemplations, interactions, explorations, pressing questions, old, new and personal histories, collective memories, interruptions and fantasies.
— Laura Leppert
