Septem­ber 21, 2019 – Jan­uary 19, 2020
Open­ing: Fri­day, Septem­ber 20, 2019, 7 p.m. (with a per­for­mance by Tra­jal Har­rell at 8.30 p.m.)

Par­ti­ci­pat­ing artists: Jesse Dar­ling, Fla­ka Hal­i­ti, Tra­jal Har­rell, Paul Ma­heke, Nick Mauss, Park McArthur, Os­car Muril­lo, Son­dra Per­ry

The ex­hi­bi­tion Tran­s­cor­po­re­al­i­ties re­flects on the mu­se­um as a perme­able body in which vari­ous bi­o­log­i­cal, so­cial, tech­no­log­i­cal, po­lit­i­cal, and eco­nom­ic sys­tems flow in­to each other. Like all hu­man and non­hu­man en­ti­ties, it en­gages in per­pe­t­u­al metabolic pro­cess­es with its en­vi­ron­ment.

Against this back­drop, the ex­hi­bi­tion ac­ti­vates an area in the mu­se­um that is free­ly ac­ces­si­ble and opens to­ward the ur­ban space with its trans­par­ent façades and glass doors on two sides: the foy­er. As a tran­si­tio­n­al space it forms a kind of mem­brane—on the one hand to pro­tect the sen­si­tive in­n­er life of the in­sti­tu­tion from ex­ter­nal in­flu­ences, and on the other hand to open its pores to the en­vi­ron­ment and thus al­low it to breathe. The art­works act di­rect­ly on the space, cre­ate new mi­cro-ar­chi­tec­tures, in­cor­po­rate the ex­ist­ing fa­cil­i­ties, or trace paths that run through the col­lec­tion and fur­ther medi­ums the mu­se­um em­ploys to reach its au­di­ence. The works are im­mer­sive, pro­ces­su­al, or per­for­ma­tive. Some de­lib­er­ate­ly re­sist ma­te­rial tan­gi­bil­i­ty.

With his large-scale in­s­tal­la­tion of bleach­ers invit­ing the vis­i­tors to take a seat be­tween life-size fig­ures, Os­car Muril­lo cre­ates an ago­ra si­t­u­a­tion around a stage on which a wide-rang­ing pro­gram of events will take place dur­ing the ex­hi­bi­tion. A sim­i­lar per­for­ma­tive po­ten­tial­i­ty is suggest­ed by Paul Ma­heke’s in­ter­ven­tions: with his new body of work he de­lib­er­ate­ly draws at­ten­tion to the thresh­olds be­tween in­te­ri­or and ex­te­ri­or and calls in OOLOI—a fan­tas­ti­cal alien be­ing of a third gen­der. Fla­ka Hal­i­ti al­so ex­amines the per­spec­tives on non­hu­man cor­po­re­al­i­ties and fo­cus­es on ob­s­cure deep-sea crea­tures that ex­ist be­yond hu­man reach and thus pro­voke spec­u­la­tions. While Jesse Dar­ling’s in­s­tal­la­tion with ref­er­ences to the le­g­end of the Cologne pa­tron Saint Ur­su­la oc­cu­pies some of the lock­ers in the foy­er, Son­dra Per­ry’s back­hoe in­s­tal­la­tion up­ends West­ern hu­man ex­cep­tio­n­al­ism. Tech­nolo­gies of rep­re­sen­ta­tion are al­so shown to be porous when Per­ry us­es them to re­veal in­her­ent dis­crim­i­na­to­ry con­struc­tions of iden­ti­ty. Park McArthur un­der­s­tands the body as a re­la­tio­n­al struc­ture rather than a self-con­tained unit. The ma­te­rial­i­ty of her two sculp­tu­ral works in the foy­er—­made of sound-, fric­tion-, and shock-ab­sorb­ing foam and rub­ber—­point to the in­ter­de­pen­den­cies be­tween bodies and their en­vi­ron­ment. With her artis­tic con­tri­bu­tion to the ca­t­a­logue she push­es the boun­daries of the ex­hi­bi­tion walls even fur­ther.