Act VI: Remember Humanity

2010 Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art Exhibition

The exhibition Remember Humanity starts from this hypothesis and includes the work of artists who approach “our” present as a field of fragmented existences and isolated interests. Together, these works provide a partial sense of how the construction of the world and the construction of the idea of humanity are mutually conditioned. The works here included do not set out to affirm “humanity” in a nostalgic way, or attempt to “retrieve” it from the record of lost ideas. More central to the logic of these works is an examination of how the notion of human is constructed – in opposition to the animal, to madness, to the idea of the primitive, in contraposition to War, and also in the affirmation of “labor” and “consciousness.”

Many of the themes that have dominated contemporary political thought point to the ominous view that “humanity” has become an historical subject, no longer essential to contemporary economic and political considerations. For instance, the notion of “bare life” taken up by Giorgio Agamben, suggests a bankruptcy of the human rights charter in terms of humanity’s capacity to hold to its principles of freedom and equality. The notion of “immaterial labor,” most famously developed by Maurizio Lazzarato, indicates a further alienation of the world from its material fabric and concrete foundations. The imperative suggested in the title of this exhibition, to “remember humanity,” is therefore an allusion to a present condition in which humanity has become an historical subject rather than part of our objective reality.

Morality

The exhibition is part of the year-long leitmotiv Morality.
Morality incorporates a changing constellation of five exhibitions, a discursive web platform, film program, performance cycle, symposium and book.

Curators: Juan A. Gaitàn and Nicolaus Schafhausen, assisted by Amira Gad

Artists: Ziad Antar, Julieta Aranda, Mirosław Bałka, Milena Bonilla, Lee Bul, Luke Fowler, Minouk Lim, Goshka Macuga, Kent Monkman, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Julika Rudelius, Michael Stevenson, Rosemarie Trockel

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