Gemini

September 2018–January 2019
Solitude Project Space, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Delphi Kino, Climax Institutes

There is a desire to put things into place and time, a longing for an enclosed form, position, and belonging. Narratives, both, the ones we are told and the ones we tell, offer moments of identification. In doing so, they guarantee pleasure, as well as disappointment and doubt. Through the figure of the double Gemini seeks to explore ways in which myth, fate and history — forms of preconceived narratives — collide within present day imaginaries.

Over the course of 5 months Gemini will unfold in a publication and series of events culminating in two exhibition chapters that mark the reopening of Akademie Schloss Solitude’s project space in central Stuttgart.

Gemini is curated by anorak and realised in cooperation with Akademie Schloss Solitude, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart and Delphi Kino.

 
Gemini I
Rosa Aiello, Tupac Cruz, Daniel Hopp, James N. Kienitz Wilkins, Julica Morlok and Ana Wild

Opening 16 November 7pm at Römerstr. 2a
Exhibition continues: 17 November – 8 December

 

Gemini II
Nancy Holt & Robert Smithson, Judith Kakon, Julica Morlok, Ben Rivers and Andrew Norman Wilson

Opening 14 December 7pm at Römerstr. 2a
Exhibition continues: 15 December – 6 January 2019

 

The Gemini Journal
A discursive site extending the exhibitions and events, published on Akademie Schloss Solitude’s publication platform Schlosspost.
The Gemini Journal is a collection of conversations, close readings, videos, listening pieces, and stories that share a suspicion towards a wholesome understanding of identity. Instead, they introduce a polyphony of voices that speak to the complexity of identity from the perspective of artists, researchers, and curators.

With contributions by anorak, James N. Kienitz Wilkins & Andrew Norman Wilson, Ana Wild & Johanna Markert, Douglas Rogerson, Tom Rosenberg, and Shaka McGlotten & Alkisti Efthymiou, Katharina Jabs and Elmar Mellert.

 

A GRIN WITHOUT A CAT THE VERY TALE by Katharina Jabs
26 September 9pm
Film Premiere and Launch of Gemini at Delphi Kino
Followed by Premiere Party at Climax Institutes (organised by Last Exit to Paradise)

 

Occasional Criticism
26 October 6pm
Publication Launch, Screening and Dinner with Mike Sperlinger & Madeleine Bernstorff
at Delphi Kino and Künstlerhaus Stuttgart

 

 

Some Thoughts on Gemini

Myths are stories about people who became too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods. (1)

Gemini is the Latin word for ‘twins’ as well as the astrological star sign. Through the figure of the double, Gemini seeks to explore ways in which myth, fate and history – forms of preconceived narratives – trigger processes of identification within imaginaries of the present. The central question of the project is how subjectivities are shaped through the stories that we tell ourselves, that we are subject of and to.

In storytelling lies a desire to put things into place and time, a longing for an enclosed form, position, and belonging. Narratives, both, the ones we are told and the ones we tell, offer moments of identification. In doing so, they guarantee pleasure, as well as disappointment and doubt. Identification occurs when something is allowed to coincide with itself. Strangely though, it can also be described as the experience of an other being fundamentally different, exterior from ourselves, and essentially inaccessible — “it is no longer ‘you are here’ that counts, but the fact that ‘you are you’.” (2)

Have you ever fallen in love?

Isn’t it curious that Romeo and Juliet (the “star cross’d lovers”) (3), is essentially based on error. The cunning plan of staging Juliet’s death is completed by Romeo mistaking her for being dead which eventually leads to both taking their lives. The tragedy however, lies not in the literary form nor in their death, but in the coincidence of the expected taking place. Indeed, their fate is already announced in the prologue, and yet, it is the very moment of the foreseen violently crashing into reality that leaves us in awe.

Is tragedy a choice? (4)

Gemini inquires into the affective power of this strange sensation that seems to reveal a surplus, an excess, and estrangement inherent in identification. Let’s sit with it a little bit and not forget that the play is not yet over. It is not death in which Romeo and Juliet concludes, but the chaos the citizens of Verona are left with. And so are we.

It’s madness.

If we think of identification in a way that takes mistake and error into account, if we think that it is always tied to mistaking something for something else, would then not estrangement and bewilderment become the defining and productive framework for subjectivity?

We mistrust the cathartic effect of crisis. We doubt the notion of the disruptive event which eradicates the past. Gemini does not seek purification. Neither is its attitude fatalistic, nor does it propose a new beginning. Instead it is an attempt to critically approach and face the ways in which subjectivities, communities and societies are formed by identification processes that are fundamentally mysterious and paradoxical.

_
(1) Anne Carson, Grief Lessons – Four Plays Euripides, nyrb (2006), p. 8
(2) Clément Rosset, Le régime des passions, Paris (2001), p. 16, quoted in Alenka Zupančič, The Double and Its Relationship to the Real (2015)
(3) Cp. William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (Prologue) (1597) [a very stereotypical example indeed]
(4) Ellen Cantor, Pinochet Porn, Super 8mm transferred to video (black and white and colour, sound), 123 min (2008-16)

 

 

Supported by Kulturamt Stuttgart, the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts Baden-Württemberg, Akademie Schloss Solitude and Anorak e.V. members