Bad Reading Group:
Jandra Böttger, Elio J Carranza, Severin Geißler, Diane Hillebrand, Bruno Jacoby, Cécile Kobel, Mathias Lempart, Arootin Mirzakhani, Esther Poppe, Johanna Schäfer, Tatjana Stürmer, Yana Tsegay

Bad Readings features manifestations of affective and bodily modes of experiencing an exhibition. They emerged in a workshop, convened by Diane Hillebrand, that took place at the Badischer Kunstverein in August of 2020. Dissenting from standardized and normalizing patterns of reception, the Bad Reading Group approached the exhibition If It’s For The People, It Needs To Be Beautiful, She Said by the artist Jeremiah Day, on view at the Kunstverein during the first half of the year.

A stuttering, a far-fetched interpretation, the sensation of boredom while reading a canonical text – “At one time or another, everyone has been a bad reader,” writes Tyler Bradway. The exhibition project adapts his affect- and queer-theoretical approach based on literary theory and understands exhibits, the bodies of visitors, building, rooms, texts, and graphics as components of a curatorial ‘text’. Using this concept, exhibitions can be interrogated with regard to their legibility, and new, illegitimate modes of reading are tried out. It is a question of reinterpreting these transgressions as insights, of generating apposite misunderstandings and performative omissions, and of manifesting these spatially, conceptually, and bodily, thereby propelling the grammar of curatorial practice into a productive crisis.

Using (sceno)graphic, artistic, and performative resources, Bad Readings engages in a multi-voiced critique and citational repetition of the exhibition by Jeremiah Day, the exhibited artistic praxis, and its curatorial mediation. The most diverse experiences of reading the exhibition are expressed in letters and artworkscomposed by the Bad Reading Group during their perusal of the exhibition. On the one hand, the letters thematize structural problems of exhibition-making, while on the other addressing concrete details of the experienced exhibition. The letter form encompasses personal experiences, preempts critical distance, and may beirreverent, intimate, or aggressive.

On opening day, the exhibition will open at 6 pm. The welcome greeting, to be delivered by Diane Hillebrand, will take place at 7 pm and will be followed by a foreword by Cécile Kobel and an address by Arootin Mirzakhani. Attendance is limited to 50 persons, please register in advance at ed.nierevtsnuk-rehcsidab(ta)ofni

Beginning at 9 pm in the exhibition will be a performance by Yana Tsegay. Attendance is limited to 20 persons, please register in advance at ed.nierevtsnuk-rehcsidab(ta)ofni