Installation View
Morag Keil
THEY
Le Consortium, Dijon
The THEY exhibition seeks to create a diffracted image of youth – a community without community, thriving in a dissolved, uncertain world where referents move freely, unburdened by hierarchies, and transcending generational and gender constraints.
The exhibition delves into the emergence of languages and forms, exploring how the foundations of a lexicon are established, and how a new way of making art, of being “contemporary” comes about. These contemporary perspectives presume acts of ownership, disappearance, ventriloquism, and the emergence of many social, interpersonal, political, and esthetic practices and experiments – always in action and opposing the inertia of walls.
THEY thus establishes human maps, a sort of moral fable home to all kinds of affects and relationships of identification and indifference – forms of disappearance, a spectral base which leads us, in a certain way, into these worlds where virtuality reigns. It is a temporary refuge for “wild young people”: dissidents of systems and borders, creators of shapes, bodies, vehicles, and multiplicities, who want life, and not capital, to breed.
THEY, is not about us. It is the statement of a shortfall, a gap.
Given this external perspective, how can we express the condition and creativity of a virtualized collective body? How can we get around the deadlocks of traditional differences, innocence, and primary inventiveness? Can it be achieved by not doing sociology against a backdrop of existential and esthetic crisis? By freeing ourselves from a senile passion for whatever moves, lives, and rebels? How can we conceive of this transitional creature, unable to solidify in its unfinished forms, and instead very much ready to give in, so to speak, to its own unspecialized and powerful youth, turning away from any destiny and specific environment, and holding on to nothing else but its own immaturity and ignorance
— Stéphanie Moisdon