Iris Dressler

Day 1: Changing from the Inside: How should we Govern Ourselves?

Perspective 2 - 11 November 2022.

Abstract

Negotiating conflicts and connecting lines

If the goal of the public museum or public art institution of the future is to be a more just or even equitable institution, it cannot correspond to one model that would cancel out all contradictions, but can only emerge on the basis of permanent, decentrally negotiated conflicts and connecting lines – divisible and indivisible moments of joy, empowerment and sorrow, success and failure, agreement and outrage, understanding and misunderstanding, friendship and rupture. Listening would then mean being able to both allow and question and reject criticism – beyond the competitive pursuit of a positive image, exclusivity and superlatives. How can we embrace each other without smothering each other?

In my contribution, I would like to tie these reflections to two aspects:

  1. Despite decades of debate, the still dominant and unfair working conditions within the art industry, ranging from artists* to interns.
  2. The conflicts between two high values: artistic freedom and the fight against discrimination. In the context of documenta 15, this conflict was and is being instrumentalised in Germany in a highly questionable way by the media and politics, with the result that in the name of anti-discrimination, the most diverse forms of discrimination have been and are being given free rein. In this way, documenta 15 was and is being distracted from the fact that it makes a few fundamental suggestions for a structural change in the art world.

Biography

Iris Dressler and Hans D. Christ have been Codirectors of the Württembergischer Kunstverein (WKV), Stuttgart, since 2005, with a particular focus on the exploration of collaborative, transcultural, and transdisciplinary practices of curating. In 2019, they were the artistic directors of the Bergen Assembly, and in 1996 they founded the Hartware Medienkunstverein, which they directed until 2004.

Under their direction, the Kunstverein has presented solo exhibitions of artists such as Carrie Mae Weems (2022), Lorenza Böttner (2019, curated by Paul B. Preciado), Imogen Stidworthy (2018), Alexander Kluge (2020 and 2017), Ines Doujak (2016), Teresa Burga (2011, curated by Miguel Lopez and Emilio Tarazona), Michaël Borremans (2011), Daniel G. Andújar (2008), Anna Oppermann (2007, curated by Ute Vorkoeper), and Stan Douglas (2007). Recent group exhibitions include the four-part project Actually, the Dead Are Not Dead (2019–22 in Bergen and Stuttgart with various constellations of co-curators) and 50 Years after 50 Years of the Bauhaus (2018). She teaches regularly at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Stuttgart, and elsewhere, and has published largely on contemporary art and its political and theoretical contexts.