September 8th – October 15th
Curated by Anette Baldauf and Renate Lorenz
 

The exhibition sets a stage to welcome the appearance of specters: events, signs, images, practices and objects that point towards a violent past and sketch a possible future. In the context of arts-based research the show introduces conjuring specters as a proper method. Hauntopia's prospects for unsettling the here and now is tested out.

Building on a glossary of hauntopia the exhibited works are looking for traces, negations even, of things, stories and future visions, while in many instances making use of formats that employ ephemeral, opaque or sci-fi elements. Thus the exhibition explores the range of a ghostly aesthetics: In Naomi Rincón-Gallardo's video work, for instance, a set of fantastic species from a forgotten future – located between trashy leftovers and a not-yet-here gender-ambiguity – explore the connections between sexuality and colonialism and create a counter-world within neocolonial settings.

In Moira Hille's installation documents of ghost ships are contrasted with migrating boats in the Mediterranean and ask for the potential of the ghost as a visual-political strategy beyond current visibility discourses. A backpack appears as a phantom-object in Zsuzsi Flohr's installation; despite its material absence it became the main protagonist of a holocaust survival story.

Rafal Morusiewicz' film installation conjures ghostly figures out of found footage from Polish (experimental) cinema – figures pushed to the margins in the times of the Polish People's Republic. Belinda Kazeem-Kaminski photographic installation shows the impossibility of visualizing traces of Na-Badu, an Ashanti woman, who was displayed in the Viennese Prater in 1896.