Rehearsals of Porosity

Veza Fernández, Ülkü Süngün, Niloufar Emamifar & Benjamin Hirte with Andreas Rumpfhuber

The event series Rehearsals of (…), taking place in different iterations, explores the potential of embodied and situated artistic critique. Kevin Space invites artists and writers to site-specifically think and work through ways of shaping the frameworks within which they operate – including the respective relationships to bodies, places, knowledges, and histories that these infrastructures allow for – and to push their material and ideological boundaries. After six years of exhibition making, Kevin Space furthermore aims at critically reflecting on our own involvements, desires and motivations.

In today’s landscape of contemporary art, conditions that are seemingly criticised–through claims to diversity or capitalist critique–are often structurally reproduced, sedimenting in recognisable and consumable codes, images and language, as currencies in exchanges of “difference.” Well-intended measures of transformation can easily ossify the structures of inequality that are meant to be targeted and oppose the lived experiences within the walls of the same spaces. These institutional walls are here not understood necessarily in an architectural sense but as sets of beliefs, affects and desires, perpetuated by bodies participating in the field of art.

For the second iteration, Rehearsals of Porosity, Kevin Space, together with the invited artists and guests, focuses on various delineations of the spaces of contemporary art and the subjectivities it creates, as well as the structural and lived relationships to its socio-spatial surroundings. While special attention is given to Kevin Space’s ambivalent position at Volkertmarkt, ​​Rehearsals of Porosity is a general inquiry into the creation of permeability within the membranes of a semi-autonomous field by means of visceral-somatic, dialogical, formal and research-based methods and embodiments.

Documentation of Rehearsals of Madness with Laura Hatting, Krõõt Juurak, Sophia Roxane Rohwetter, Miriam Stoney