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| Party leftovers at Merve Verlag |
In a brightly lit space, the exhibition Instant Theory opened last Friday night at nGbK. Not only were all the lights on, but also the space was kept clear, fiercely facing the long cube of nGbK. Nostalgia was clearly not one of the curatorial team's ambitions in displaying portrait photography of the Westberlin cult publishing house Merve. Short texts accompanied the portraits of Merve friends and authors, divided into sections of collectivity, seriality, chaos and friendship.
If the outlook of this archival exhibition was fresh and contemporary, so were the questions that accompanied it: "What are the vectors of alternative knowledge dissemination? What, in this context, are the functions of collectivity, seriality, chaos and friendship? What is the difference between a collective and a network, and what danger lies in their respective openness to neoliberal co-opting? Why have visibilities like that of women or of the work of translating in (independent) text production often been unequally distributed (something that continues to be the case) and which shifts in value are needed here?"
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| Wolfgang Müller and Nikolaus Utermöhlen, friends of Merve Verlag |
I found the exhibition inspiring. From a curatorial perspective: an archival exhibition that doesn't clutter but trusts its viewer to make own connections. From a theory perspective: to make theory look accessible to everyone who wants to engage with it. Instant Theory or theory in an instant form sounds like instant coffee: simple, enabling people to make coffee in just a moment and everywhere, while having nonetheless a long shelf life. Theory that doesn't ask to withdraw for years, but can be made in the disco or on the couch with friends. A theory that thrives on collaboration, on chaos, on imagination and fantasy. The exhibition made me feel like we could theory again in the 2020s.
I was most fascinated with Heidi Paris, who was together with Peter Gente the publisher of Merve Verlag. In the back of the exhibition her window series is shown, an invitation to a "kleinen poetischen Träumerei am Fenster" (a little poetic reverie at the window). "To make visible the visible," so Heidi Paris, which I thought was original because most artists have the ambition to make the invisible visible. The window piece fits with Heidi Paris' practise of making lists. "The question is," Heidi Paris comments in the film, "how I arrive from two to three." Later, at home, I checked Heidi Paris' website, made by her friend Marianne Karbe and read that Heidi Paris also had ideas for window display installations: a sign with "Lektor und Lektorin" (male editor and female editor), accompanied by the sign "Unsere Aussichten - Ihre Einsichten" (Our outlooks - your insights). Playful and funny, as also theory can be.
