(Un)Being

08.02.2025 — 09.03.2025

Dara Maillard, Loris Mauerhofer

Kunstverein Frauenfeld 

(UN)BEING TOGETHER
EXHIBITION INTRODUCTION BY PROF. DR. JÖRG SCHELLER

The fact that an exhibition like (Un)Being by Dara Maillard and Loris Mauerhofer is taking place in 2025 is not a matter of course. It brings together two approaches that often seem to be mutually exclusive in today's strategically fueled and attentiongrabbing cultural wars: The particular and the universal, the temporal and the supratemporal, the engaged and the poetic, the social and the existential.

When the two young artists work together quite naturally and bring feminism, history, existentialism, anthropology and philosophy, among other things, into a constructive dialogue, this has a signal effect beyond art: despite all polarizations, identitarian bubbles and divergent attitudes, it is possible to find common points of reference.

In order to understand the relevance of this exhibition, it needs to be contextualized. Such a contextualization could seem like a routine gesture. At the latest with the leftprogressive “social turn” in the art scene of the 1960s and 70s, questions about the social, political and economic contexts of the arts increasingly came to the fore. Feminism in particular was fighting against universalist theories, as these concealed concrete differences, such as the unjust unequal treatment of the sexes. Supratemporal existentials, all well and good – but aren't tangible social, political and economic problems more urgent? Isn't art strongly conditioned by concrete temporal contexts? Meanwhile, “contextualization” has become so vehement that the art historian Claire Bishop warned a few years ago not to forget the aesthetic, the specifically artistic and the poetic above all the social and other contexts.

With regard to (Un)Being, however, “contextualizing” is not simply a commonplace time-critical, art-critical or art-historical reflex. Rather, it is intended to show the difference that Mauerhofer's and Maillard's works make in the context of their time, and that this difference is an important one.

Sociologist Andreas Reckwitz has observed that a “society of singularities” has emerged in the so-called West in recent decades – a society in which the modern logic of the general, i.e. modern mass societies, is giving way to a logic of the singular. Today, we are all called upon to design ourselves into something unique, unmistakable, outstanding, special. We “customize” our products, we develop “unique selling propositions”, we “individualize” courses of study at universities – this is not least what creative capitalism or “aesthetic capitalism”, as the philosopher Gernot Böhme calls it, requires. When the general basic material needs are largely satisfied, extraordinary but insatiable “desires” come to the fore.

What is lost in the course of this development is the sense of what people have in common – everything that the society of singularities represses so that we can always feel completely exceptional, completely unique: We are born, we live, we breathe, we feel joy, we feel pain, we feel pleasure, we love, we hate, we fall ill, we recover, we are afraid, we laugh, we cry, we quarrel, we hope, we die, and so on.

It would be banal to emphasize all of this if it had not been pushed far into the background recently. The focus of public media debates and the attention of the art system has been and continues to be on what separates us from one another, especially in social terms – just think of the debates surrounding identity politics. How people differ from one another has been broken down into ever more granular terms, and ever finer group identities have been launched and codified. This was and is not wrong, and it has many advantages. Many important impulses have come from it. The specific experiences, the specific circumstances of specific groups could thus be analyzed and better understood.

One result of this process, however, is that today you can find separate shelves with queer literature in bookshops, so that it might seem as if queer people are somehow outside of “normality”. I hope that was not the intention. It has led to some people talking about “whites” and “blacks” again, or about men and women, as if they are beings that can be clearly distinguished from one another. It has also led to people barricading themselves in their identities instead of opening up and therefore being easily pitted against each other. In short, it has led to people no longer recognizing that they are standing in a forest for the trees. This forest is the existential and the physical.

This is where Dara Maillard and Loris Mauerhofer come into play. In their works, they give space to what people share, and they do so in different but mutually fruitful ways. They are not simply opposing the zeitgeist, but pointing out its blind spots and contributing to a more complete picture.

It is the anthropological, existential and bodily dimension that has been pushed into the background in the course of the “social turn” that characterizes (Un)Being. Of course, “anthropological” does not refer to the old anthropology that measured skulls and divided people into races. Quite the opposite. The more recent anthropology is critical, social-scientific and philosophically inspired. And yet it focuses on the existential and bodily experiences that we all share – under diNerent conditions – because we not only have bodies (Körper), but are bodies (Leiber), as the philosopher and anthropologist Helmuth Plessner wrote. The “Leib” is the medium that connects us to the world, and in our corporeality we are all connected to each other. The “Leib” is not a monad, but interwoven with its environment, yet it is never identical with it. In Plessner's sense, it is not a given “nature”, but always also a manufactured culture – “natural artificiality”, as he called it. Because the “Leib” is culture and nature at the same time, it cannot have any other “positionality” than, in Plessner's words, an “eccentric” one. The human being as a corporeal being has no fixed center, no fixed identity, no fixed essence – unless the essence is the recurring question of what this center actually is.

If you look at Loris Mauerhofer's work “Where does Your Body begin?” in the first room against the background of these considerations, you will sense that it is precisely this “eccentric positionality” and the existentially delimited “Leib” interwoven with the (surrounding) world, rather than the isolated body, that is at issue. The work “Let me be the hill You build your house upon” in the second room also raises similar questions. Mauerhofer's questions are the big questions – questions that are perhaps kept too small in an age that can aNord to focus on the granular and micro-levels. But it is precisely in times of crisis and upheaval, when things become existential again, that the big questions become more crucial. Mauerhofer's ostensibly timeless art is timely.

Because our lives are always in biological as well as cultural, temporal as well as supratemporal contexts, it is not a contradiction to the existential, anthropological and Leiblichen that Dara Maillard specifically deals with female bodies and female experiences from a feminist perspective. The title of the work “Mes Mères” (note the plural!) in the third room, for example, suggests that we not only have specific biological parents, but also diverse cultural, social and historical ones. Maillard does not present female bodies and experiences as isolated phenomena, but always in such a “carnal” and sensory way that the existential understood from the Leib in Plessner's sense – is not neglected. When Maillard deals with history, it is with embodied, corporeal history, not with aloof figures, statistics or “structures”. Her works therefore do not evoke associations with radical social constructivism, according to which society, culture, signs, symbols and performance dominate the flesh and the biological. No, the signs and the bodies are rather incessantly dancing with each other, wrestling with each other. We do not simply do something with our bodies, our bodies also do something with us.

If one takes into account that all the works to be seen – and felt! – in this exhibition are decidedly aesthetic and sensory, i.e. they do not sacrifice the perceptual, the artistic and the poetic on the antiseptic altar of some “position” or some “context”, this also emphasizes the leibliche dimension, as our senses connect us with the world, whatever the latter may be: there is no truth without perception, there is no sense without senses. Aesthetics, as the philosopher Wolfgang Welsch once put it, is when sensory perception merges into sense perception. The sense-senses continuum runs through the exhibition as a red-grey thread – sense perception is irreducibly linked to sensory perception in all the works presented; just as the particular truth of the historical, cultural, political and social is linked to the interconnecting truth of the Leib and the existential.