While the long history of individuation is well documented in philosophy, literature, law, and social sciences, it is in the history of the arts that we find iterations and examples of the dividual and its proposition – from antiquity to modernity all the way to contemporary art. With the second digital revolution, we are now faced with subjectivities that are divided from themselves online and offline and at the same time come to life through networks and constellations. As much as the dividual is a product of our networked computer reality today, it also precedes the individual, as it hints on nomadic, shared, and communal social existence. The dividual denotes a broad set of subjectivities that are divided and at the same time are always in relation to others. Through a multi-disciplinary approach, this exhibition will explore the dividual by a deployment of materials, including contemporary artworks and design pieces, along with historical artifacts, and archival documents.
The term dividual appears at different points when anthropologists, artists, and philosophers tried to describe an emergent subjectivity that does not comply with the logic of the individual. The exhibition explores six different perspectives as entry points to the dividual; In anthropological literature of South Asia and Melanesia (McKim Marriott, Marilyn Strathern), and of the Andean and Ama- zonia (Eduardo Viveiros de Castro), the dividual appears as a form of kinship; In the critique of the society of control and the rise of digital and financial networks (Gilles Deleuze, Gerald Raunig, Arjun Appadurai, Michaela Ott), it is presented as a distributed subjectivity; In black study (Robin D.G. Kelley, Cedric Robinson, MLK, Marronage, Octavia Butler, Sylvia Wynter, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney), it is experienced as a presence that expands historically and by that generates the solidarity of the undercommons; Within the shock of modernity it emerges as a form of being that both expands and divides the individual (in Psychoanalysis, Feminism, Marxism, and Surrealism); In relation to the soviet science of manage- ment and shock work (Platon Kerzhentsev, Andrei Platonov, Sergei Eisenstein, El Lissitzky, Evald Ilyenkov, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin), it is perceived through new divisions of labour that provide measures or scales between individual and mass, or person and collective; And in the philosophy of biology (Lynn Margulis, Alphonso Lingis, Bruno Latour, Alexander Tarakhovsky), it is perceived as a holo- biont - a unit that is an assembly of elements folded into one another.
These various perspectives are explored in the exhibition The Dividual through contemporary and historical art works, documents, and archival materials. A discursive program highlighting the themes of the exhibition will include lectures, discussions, talks, performances, and screenings.
/
Opening on Friday, July 2nd, 2021, 18:00, with a performance by Emmanuela Soria Ruiz. From Monday, July 5th, to Friday, July 16th, 2021, the exhibition will be open between 12:00 – 16:00. It will remain closed on Saturdays and Sundays. Please respect the hygiene regulations effective for the campus of the Leuphana University.
Location: Campus Halle 25 (Kunstraum), Universitätsallee 1, D-21335 Lüneburg