That bodies speak, we have also known that for a long time.* | Dass die Körper sprechen, auch das wissen wir seit langem.*
Publication to the exhibition from January to April 2004.
Ed. by Hemma Schmutz and Tanja Widmann for the Generali Foundation. Preface by Dietrich Karner, editorial by Sabine Breitwieser, Texts by Sigrid Adorf, Giorgio Agamben, Anja Streiter, Jutta Koether, Hemma Schmutz and Tanja Widmann.
The body in its linguisticality, the theme of the exhibition and the catalogue, is already suggested by the quotation from Gilles Deleuze in the exhibition’s title, which acts as a provocative appeal to discuss afresh already familiar questions. So in what sense do bodies produce language, how are they themselves grasped and defined by it, and what spaces for action are opened by this understanding? We approach the speaking body by looking at the often fleeting gesture in everyday contexts of life and work. While gesture seems to be clearly readable as a rhetorical instrument, its political potential has often been located in its contradictoriness, performativity, and ambivalence. The exhibited art works and texts presented refer to this productive aspect of the gesture, and thus to forms of theoretical thought and aesthetic practice that take disconcerting incongruity, dissonance, and ambiguity as points of departure for political and ethical options for action in film, art, and popular culture.