Bad Reading Group: Jandra Böttger, Elio J Carranza, Severin Geißler, Diane Hillebrand, Bruno Jacoby, Cécile Kobel, Mathias Lempart, Arootin Mirzakhani, Moritz Nebenführ, 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 artworks composed 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 be irreverent, intimate, or aggressive. 
 

Are we able to represent human feelings? How might we communicate them and ultimately, turn them into a visual experience? In regards to the representation and transmission of subjective perception, popular conceptions of an ostensibly objective design practice quickly reach their limit. The immense interest in the topic, as in the transgression of prevailing norms of representation, brings to mind the current hype for immersive production, where an immediate experience is created by means of physical and psychological immersion. 
 

Drawing on these unconventional strategies, Mathias Lempart’s Proto Migraine Buildings overcome the limits of an objective design practice. He uses the example of migraine in order to test the ways one might visualize pain. The exhibition is the final step in an extensive research and production process that spanned an entire year. His research cleverly incorporates his findings and expeditions around the archives and museum displays of the Wellcome Collection, London (UK), Teylers Museum, Haarlem (NL) and the Museum of Jurassic Technology, Los Angeles (USA). The resulting “buildings” read as characters, or strange anthropomorphic structures that have been animated through audio and video, and in the case of Severin even provokes the viewer to activate the sound sensitive red traffic light, so that many viewers could be seen clapping and even screaming before the work. These animated bodies are rooted in real accounts, of five patients who suffer from severe migraine. There is an apparent subversion of exhibition design and museum codes, and symbols—while Lempart might appear to be celebrating the provisional or naïve form, he seems particularly astute at activating the complex data he obtained from his migraine interviewees and his own experience.

Anna Schanowski, 2018