Künstlerhaus Stuttgart

Alpha Centauri

01 - 12 Dec 2018

Alpha Centauri, exhibition view at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, 2019
ALPHA CENTAURI
01–12 December 2018

Alpha Centauri* is an experiment in two parts with students from the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm and the State Academy of Fine Arts, Stuttgart.

The work is oriented around two levels of the Künstlerhaus, which will be repurposed as ateliers, living spaces, and an environment activated by, and defined through individual and collective making. In the period of living and working together, a total work is produced, parsing out the conflicting dimensions of control/frame and out of control/unpredictability.

As an educational project and experiment, Alpha Centauri is in part a meditation on the increasing ubiquity of a managerial culture and its associated emphasis on measurability, accountability, performance, and self-evaluation. The project looks at this form of management and its manifestations in the administration and mediation of art, while testing out some alternative scenarios. It is a process of staying put with the contingent nature of the given setup, and engaging with the third mind generated from within the collaborative process.
These practices connect with the history of Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, a space with a tradition of self-organisation, initiated and formulated by young artists and art students in the late 70s. Here energies and pleasures of self-exile are introduced into a conversation that challenges some of its historic privileges and exclusions.
Although its outcome remains unknown, Alpha Centauri intends to live with qualities of sociability, discord, the transformative and ineffable in the teaching and making of art.

Part I
Maiken Buus Andersen, Izabel Färnstrand, Salad Hilowle, Sonia Sagan, Oscar Kaleva Karlsson, Vida Lavén, Mari Mattsson, Linnéa Ndangoya Palmcrantz, Emilie Palmelund, Levi Sebton and Jesper Vesterlund
Opening on 30 November, with a performance by YOR at 9pm
Part II of Alpha Centauri opens on 15 December, from 7pm
Leon Dürnay, Janis Eckhardt, Juliane Gebhardt, Hyunjeong Ko, Evgenia Kosareva, Lea Lenk, Jaewon Park, Tzusoo and Helen Weber

To Part II
Convened by Annika Eriksson (Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm) and Fatima Hellberg (Künstlerhaus Stuttgart)
*Alpha Centauri is the star system closest to the Solar System. Researchers have sought to verify the existence of an Earth like planet in the Alpha Centauri using transits – a slight dimming in the star as the planet passes by has been detected – but no additional, conclusive evidence.