Kunstverein Ludwigshafen presents Marlies Pöschl: Technologies of Togetherness

June 11–August 14, 2022

The more we see the impending climate crisis as a life-threatening ecological catastrophe, the louder the cries for societal reform and sustainable design approaches emerge. In this context, the question of how we can take care of one another today and in the future is becoming increasingly explosive: a lack of equal opportunities, a permanently overburdened care system, or the ongoing lack of a generational climate contract are just a few of the seismographs of the so often inconsistent social balance.Marlies Pöschl commonly depicts such cracks in a conflict-prone reality within the open frameworks of educational exchange and communal production in her multi-perspectival films and installations. Urgent questions concerning the future recur throughout her work, including how technology growth can affect life’s essential infrastructures, such as food production and care work. The Kunstverein Ludwigshafen’s show Technologies of Togetherness is the Austrian artist’s first solo institutional presentation in Germany.

Pöschl’s cinematic storytelling transport viewers to hidden landscapes and reveal breathtaking fusions of myth, documentary, and science fiction. They keep returning to regions on the periphery of social life, where they operate according to their own internal logic. Her film Evernormal Granary (2022), which was created specifically for the exhibition, also focuses on a closed organism: the state granary in Ludwigshafen on the Rhine is presented as a self-regulating architecture that is supposed to compensate for supply and demand fluctuations, according to the premise.Marlies Pöschl’s latest film essay contrasts industrial food production with indigenous ecological ideas, addressing questions of economics, food security, botany, and food speculation, as well as logistics. The artist partnered with Amelia Eisen, a choreographer from the United States, on Evernormal Granary. The ballet performed by the granary’s “guards” is based on Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) and explores the reciprocal links between humans and nature through a dance in the dust and to the sound of grain processing.

Dance, music, performance, language, and poetry are just a few of the artistic mediums employed by the artist. In Marlies Pöschl’s artistic investigations, collective work is also a major connecting methodology. She routinely collaborates with other artists, as well as amateur actors and people from varied social backgrounds. Pöschl frequently initiates instructional work or direct exchanges with her counterparts, resulting in the creation of artistic creations. For example, Simple Whistles (2020) is a high-definition video based on a choir performance created in collaboration with members of the French choir La Clé des Chants and inmates of a senior citizens’ home.In response to the machine noises that surround senior citizens in their daily lives, they devised a collectively composed poetry composition about their future retirement home.

In the face of a threatened and unbalanced present, Marlies Pöschl’s films envisage the possibilities of a digital, sustainable, and caring future. Technologies of Togetherness takes a thorough look at the artist’s creative activity from the beginning to the present. The goal of this initiative is to raise awareness of the process-oriented nature of social processes in relation to contemporary societal issues among visitors to the Kunstverein Ludwigshafen. Pöschl’s art depicts the ongoing back-and-forth of human progress, in which the individual and societal demands, as well as objectivity and emotionality, sustainability and economic efficiency, are all balanced out. She is a strong supporter of both science and sensuality, and she repeatedly refers to coexistence as the only answer to our problem.

Curated by Jana Franze-Feldmann

The project is supported by Stiftung Kunstfonds within NEUSTART KULTUR, BASF SE, and by the Federal Ministry of Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sports of the Republic of Austria.