Unter dem Gewicht atmest du anders. Schuld und Haben 07. Juni – 07. September 2025

In the organizer's words:

Exhibition

with Alice Creischer, Moyra Davey, Denise Ferreira da Silva & Arjuna Neuman, Toon Fibbe, Lili Huston-Herterich, Santu Mofokeng, Natascha Nassir-Shahnian, Jochen Schmith, Miriam Stoney

June 07 - September 07, 2025

Opening: Friday, 06.06.2025, 7 pm

with the performance Der Waagenrat by Miriam Stoney at 10 pm

Debt is a comprehensive social, economic and political process that inscribes itself into realities, histories and representations both globally and locally. Between promise, compulsion and supposed guilt, suggestive charges and impersonal measurability shape abstract ideas of debt, but in concrete terms they shape people and their environments. The group exhibition Under the weight you breathe differently. Schuld und Haben brings together artistic forms of close reading (attentive reading) of materials and narratives, which deal with these preconceptions and representations, with forms of extraction and possibilities of escape.

The images and entanglements that the artists address in Unter dem Gewicht atmest du anders. Schuld und Haben are part of an indebted existence in which the abstract operations of debt are reflected in relationships. By emphasizing the materiality of money, staging the arbitrary connection between weight, value and progress or dissolving the complex connections between exploitation and accumulation, the exhibition questions what we consciously or unconsciously invest in on a daily basis:

Moyra Davey succinctly brings money and its dual imprint of power and circulation into focus in close-ups of US pennies. In Lady Credit or Finance in Drag, Toon Fibbe comments on the precursors of today's immaterial financial markets around 1700. In the video work The Treasury, Lili Huston-Herterich deals with the story of an impoverished, formerly alcoholic artist who occupies an abandoned bank building for decades in order to live and work there. She thus links the relationship between economy and health into a polyphonic narrative of relationships and expectations, of access and 'growth' as well as a queer reading of the building. Miriam Stoney manipulates the dials of scales and plays with imbalances in different contexts. Santu Mofokeng's photograph Aus/Luderitz has a direct reference to Bremen and German colonial history, which are inscribed in the Namibian landscape as an irrevocable relationship of guilt. Natascha Nassir-Shahniannexplores the correspondences between these inscriptions of guilt in German landscapes in order to initiate an open dialog. Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman explore the traces of history in the Chilean Atacema Desert, which - as much as attempts are made to conceal it - is preserved by the dry climate. In her installation Proudhon, the Society of December 10 and the Club of Lazy Debtors, Alice Creischer examines the relationships between intellectual, political and economic forces using a multi-part puppet show. The artist collective Jochen Schmith combines the privatization of parks with the logic of work and non-work in abstract compositions made from shredded banknotes.

The fact that the starting point of the works on display are mostly impersonal, countable values or the advantages of individuals, but are rarely about values and justice, is a consequence of supposedly unavoidable principles of guilt. To abstract and remain unaffected by these processes is to ignore experiences related to history, memory, identities, built and unbuilt environments. On the contrary, the integration of these aspects offers possibilities to deal with our indebted reality.

Symposium DEBT. Unsettling Matters of Interest

The exhibition complements each other with the symposium DEBT. Unsettling Matters of Interest, which took place on May 22 and 23 at the GAK. The current conjuncture of debt in political discourse is closely linked to changes in the global balance of power and changing environmental conditions. Following Leigh Claire LaBerge's rejection of an "increasing abstraction" of utilization processes, the symposium explores the social and cultural productivity of debt along the intersections of "bodies", "ecologies" and "infrastructures".

Cooperation partners

The project is an initiative of the University of Bremen and the Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst in cooperation with the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg and the Hochschule für Künste Bremen / Temporary Spaces class, which has developed a spatial activation for the symposium.

Accompanying events

Sun, 22.06., 17:00

Lecture performance by Natascha Nassir-Shanian

Tue, 24.06., 01.07. & 08.07., 11:00

Guilt/questions, mediation formats by students of the University of Bremen / Seminar Sarah Lüdemann

Thu, 17.07., 19:00

A joint reading of "Denise Ferreira da Silva - Unaffordable Debts: Scenes of value, read against the arrow of time"

Thu, 21.08., 19:00

Guided tour & board game evening on debt

Sun, 07.09., 15:00

Guided tour