Baroque Topologies

Maya Ben David
Jonathan Castro
Simon Denny
UCC Harlo
Su Yu Hsin
Mathieu Malouf
Arnold Trautwein
Jonas Wendelin
Leah Walker
Cajsa von Zeipel


with text contributions by Kea Bolenz, Louis Hay, Benedikt Kuhn, Amar Priganica, Tina Schulz, Natalya Serkova, Arnold Trautwein und Isabel Waidner

The exhibition Baroque Topologies brings together international positions of contemporary art that, in their own complexity as well as in the moment of this contextualization, span a formal and thematic web that attempts to make the present tangible through the lens of the Baroque.

Pursuing the baroque forms we follow a line that starts to vibrate. Stretched out into space, its momentum becomes the curvature of a surface, which grows into a vortex, bulging out further and further, folding in and out until it forms a complex body. In the Baroque, the mathematical theory of space is joined by the dimension of time. Under it, our line begins to lurch and create an imbalance. A break with symmetry occurs and bends the line into an ellipse. It begins to rotate and trace a spiral. If we imagine this spiral and reenact its incessant rotation in our thoughts, it creates a feeling of vertigo. Perception is thrown into a tailspin. Old familiar coordinates and orientation-giving borders dissolve. In the baroque topology, the difference between an objectively measurable external world and the subjective world of experience starts to blur. It is a fluid gesture that moves between and beyond categories formerly considered separate – body and mind, emotion and intellect, matter and information, you and I, I and O. This movement, this shape-shifting line, seems to contain valuable potential. It is this power to connect and dissolve old categories that presents itself as a baroque quality to us. With the exhibition we want to put particular attention to this as we try to make sense of the culture that surrounds us.

Accompanying the exhibition is a reader that sees itself as an experimental field of different modes of interpretation and as a reflection on the state of text production in the field of contemporary art.