Cursed to repeat the words of others, Ovid’s Echo is never able to articulate herself fully, constructing a Self only through fragments of the language around her. In a tale of fractured subjectivity, repetition, and unful-filled desire, the Lacanian ‘I’, lingers as a fiction. Here, the Self emerges as contingent on language and its law. Perpetually misidentified in societal and culturally produced images, it slips between presence and misrecognition.
Echo’s Hungerwrestles with a fundamental contradiction: how art, while positioned as a site of potential critique, might nurture rather than threaten the delineations of Self, and continuously reproduce the very subjectivity it seeks to challenge. Indeed, the yielding to the law might be read as a compulsion, the consequence of holding on to one’s own existence, that is epitomized in the predicaments of artistic critique: in the proto-neoliberal, creative subject of self-realization; in the historically disputed but never abandoned correlation between the artist’s identity and their “authentic” expressions; or in the self-referential projections at play in the process of perception.
These works linger in the slips, gaps, and missteps that allow fragmentation, inconsistency, and misidentifi-cation to persist. They engage with the instability of images and languages and the ways in which meaning shifts through repurposing, repetition, and decay. A psychoanalytic dilemma gives way to a materialist re-sponse: an approach that understands art not as static, but as a juncture within the cycles of circulation and detritus on which the fundamentals of a neoliberal subjectivity depend. Like the “I”, the art object is never fixed, but malleable, a flickering presence that both resists and succumbs to the forces that shape it. How would it be possible to disrupt this reproductive cycle of psychological, socio-economic and institutional at-tachments and desires, rather than perpetuate it? Can the “I”, with its pressures of self-expression and self-re-alization, be undone? And if so, then what?
curated by Dara Jochum and Franziska Sophie Wildförster
