I, etcetera at Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen

At the center of the group exhibition I, etcetera is an engagement with artistic subjectivity as always processual and relational. From this premise, the exhibition also turns its attention to the host institution itself, considering the ways in which it assumes and articulates a subjectivity of its own. It asks how narrative strategies and speculative propositions, operating across artistic practices and institutional(ized) processes alike, participate in producing the relations through which the self takes form.

The exhibition brings together new commissions and existing works that approach these questions in different ways, engaging with self-narration and perception, memory and projection. Throughout the practices of Julie Becker, Chan Hau Chun, Oto Gillen, Robert Glück, and Danae Io, interiors, facades, and landscapes recur in both actual and metaphorical forms: as buildings and psychic states, imaginaries and material realities, bodies and social spaces. Moving between personal and shared experience, the works on view consider how a sense of self is constituted through these relations and the dependencies and contradictions that bind them together. As Robert Glück puts it: “The self is a collaborative hodge-podge that maintains a false sense of coherence.” A literary essay by Glück is published in the accompanying brochure, while further contributions to the project come from art historian and critic Alex Kitnick, theorist and curator Doreen Mende, and curator and writer Fiona Vilmer.

The proposition of a mutable, plural subjectivity is explored through thedifferent artistic positions in the exhibition and their negotiations of contingent selfhood. In turn, the artists’ practices offer points of reference for how an institution might understand itself. For the Kunstverein, this means looking to its building and archive, to its exhibitions and public programs, to its members and audiences, and to the people who have worked within and around it. Its “body of experience” is thus dispersed across many actors, forms, and times. Against this backdrop, I, etcetera asks: If there is no singular “I,” who speaks when the institution tells its own story?