THE BARREN offers a site in which reanimated bodies, mutant animacies, and aberrant forms of becoming arise in a material opera. Populated by a series of newly commissioned automata, Andriessen's exhibition inhabits a liminal space between sculpture and performance, activated by disobedient entities whose steel carcasses perform their own requiem.
Rooted in medieval rites of violence and torture devices that developed as practical and public means of dehumanization, this dark history continues to echo within necropolitics to this day — the politics of who is allowed to live, and who is left to die.
The exhibition unfolds a world of unquiet matter in a condition of withheld generation: a choir of lamenting and resisting bodies marked by control, extraction, exhaustion, disposability, revolt, sterility, and failed renewal.
This exhibition is curated by Adam Kleinman & Joe Rowley and is supported by Mondriaanfonds, Kulturdirektoratet, Stichting Niemeijer Fonds, Stichting Stokroos, Cultuurfonds, and Gilles Hondius Foundation.