The Many Within at The Tiger Room, Munich

I would like to begin if I may, with a thought experiment. I want to ask, how manyI’sare there within you? I can start if you like. One. There is an I in me, who is a housewife. She wakes up at 6:25 am and prepares breakfast while emptying the dishwasher. Two. There is another I in me, who is a writer. I like her a lot more. Three. Another I has always been a migrant, who speaks German only hesitantly when she must. Four. There is an English I, who is silently loud in my head. What a shame, she lost her British accent.

We carry manyI’swithin us. A non-unitary, multi-layered subjectivity is part of our contem- porary historical condition.

The exhibition “The many within” echoes a call for nomadism, first made so memorably by the feminist philosopher, Rosi Braidotti. Her work on nomadism is conceived as a response to the challenges set by advanced capitalism, in which a global economy of transnational flows of capital and labor has an direct impact on the embodied subject, caught up in the ever-shifting boundaries between the center and the periphery, replicated ceaselessly on an ever-decreasing scale. This is a paradoxical world in which the metropolitan city coexists with the refugee camp, a global freely-mobile elite with the immobile migrant. To advance a subjectivity that would resist capitalism’s flow, she defines a nomadic position, taking her cue from the French post-structuralists, Deleuze and Guattari. For them, the figure of the nomad is someone who retains the capacity of rendering the boundaries between smooth and straited space fluid. No matter where a nomadic tribe might settle, however far be it from  desert  or  sea,  they  still  move  across  straited  space  as  if  it  was  unmarked.  Because for them, it is. A nomadic position approaches difference, as a difference carried “within,”not a difference defining itself against the other as a “difference from.” The second is easily acquired and absorbed by the forces of capital, the other, somehow manages to slips away.

There is an implicit demand here at stake. Nomadic positions have to be accounted for, the power  relations  through  which  they  are  constituted  and  in  which  they  operate,  carefully charted to reproduce a cartography of power. The exhibition commits to such a mapping of multiple belongings, the socio-economic and symbolic locations of the non-unitary subject.

The bodies and faces of women looking out at us from Yuchu Gao’s drawings belong to a female community, like the one of “Haenyeo” from the South Korean island of Jeju, though many others of a similar kind can be found around southern Asia. Not one but many, all con- fronting us at eye level. They free dive, often to a depth of 20 m, to harvest molluscs from the sea floor. Many are elderly now, as this cultural practice is in decline, a consequence of ongoing industrialisation. But for a long time, these divers formed their own semi-matriarcal society, challenging our preconceived notions concerning the distribution of labor and eco- nomic leadership. They looked out to the sea and saw a smooth space, or rather, they found a way of making the space of the sea smooth again for themselves. We all know women who  are  like  this,  who  build  difference  within.  We  walk  among  them  as  they  flutter  deli- cately on transparent layers of tracing paper, moving up, down and around the supporting rod, edges curling inwards and outwards. In Indian mythology, the churning of the ocean represents the transition from chaos to creation. Difference carried within is never still. It bobs up and down on the waves. Subjectivity becomes nomadic in motion.

The curving structure of Anna Lena Keller’s thermoplastic exoskeletons support a double- understanding of the body. On the one hand, the body is the biological organism already exhibiting signs of proto-technicity, where organs are defined as technologies developed in the course of evolution, allowing us to function ever more efficiently. On the other hand, the body is presented as the “technium,” consisting of all those detachable external tech- nical artefacts that expand the organ’s individual capacities, necessarily fragmented, scat- tered, but also interconnected with each other in a complex wide-ranging network. These are bodies extending nomadically into space they rendered smooth. In physically deman- ding  workplaces,  the  military  or  in  rehabilitation,  the  kind  of  exoskeleton  referenced  to by Keller, has a supportive function, assisting, augmenting and enhancing the user’s body. However, Keller’s objects only perform this supportive function, as their specific materiali- ty – worbla tape, heated around a mould, then cooled and set – is more commonly used in cosplay. Keller’s objects operate within a prosthetic theory of technology, to play with the relation between the inner and the outer. By removing any claim of functionality, the object no longer serves as a supporting device, with the inside supported by an outside structure, but performs a redrawing of their boundary.

When Iris Böhnlein introduces her art practice, she refers to herself and the kind of do- mestic environment of middle class Franconian comfort she grew up in, with its familiar routines divided between work and home. She is interested in how these past rhythms can gain visual form. Examining the emotional, social and cultural codes inscribed in everyday objects and their environments, her work becomes a kind of mapping, the charting of the embedded  subject’s  location  within  the  intersection  of  the  symbolic,  the  social  and  the cultural. She remakes routines out of paper and card – hollow, repetitive acts represented by the jug pouring or the tying of knots in black ribbon that looks like wet hair – to produ- ce what in Braidotti’s terms would be a cartography of the subject in becoming. Böhnlein understands how our past and present shapes our current subjectivities and the subjectivi- ties yet to come. An old photograph is stamped with a date in pink, as is the egg shell, an Ei containing the eye like a talisman. So much we have learnt from psychoanalysis: that the subject – the“I”- is non-unitary and non-unified, a process of negotiation between different levels of power and desire, wilful choices and unconscious drives. It is a tangled knot of different, contradictory impulses given a grand illusion of unity. My making the location of our subjectivities unfamiliar to us, Böhnlein brings to representation what by definition escapes our consciousness.

Text by Magdalena Wisniowska