Scrambled Ontologies: A Fabulation
Group show curated by Victoria Tarak
Oct 21st, 2022 – Jan 2nd, 2023
Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf

feat. Yalda Afsah, Mary Bauermeister, Grupo Mexa, Jaca, Sharon Kivland, Zoe Leonard, Jorge Loureiro, A.L. Steiner + robbinschilds, Anna R. Winder
Scrambled Ontologies: A Fabulation is a group exhibition based on critical engagement with current research on “wildness” from Jack Halberstam, Tavia Nyongo, and José Esteban Muñoz. In here, the term "wildness" seeks to capture new perspectives of polyphony and solidarity beyond capitalist, colonialist, and heteronormative structures. “Wildness” does not refer to a return of an alleged primitivism or a colonial imaginary, but rather, negotiates meanings and representations by proposing a “disorder of things” (1) . The ideas around “wildness” are concerned with reclaiming a myriad of agencies and mean to enable reflections on aesthetic experience that encounter the unspeakable, wayward or unscripted actions, engagement in the margins or within unstable everyday realities.
Although seemingly intangible,“space” and “time”, just like modes of being and action, aim to be mastered by systems of order and classification. In analogy with human-nature relations, these processes of appropriation can be understood as “domestication”, thus, an attempt to tame and regulate. In search of liberation and contradictory or ambivalent approaches to these entities, the exhibition spans a fictional web of perspectives and treatments, proposing alternatives to prevailing regimes of space and time.
Like a whisk whipping up a blend and bringing different ingredients into contact with each other, the artistic positions in Scrambled Ontologies: A Fabulation stir different temporalities and places together. They search for glitches, register autonomous zones, incite time travel, or formulate new threshold spaces.
In the midst of where we are and at the same time imagining worlds that seem distant or intangible from our own immediate reality, the exhibition brings together works that focus on the empowering efficacy of fabulation and the ghostly resonance between fact and fiction. The result is a meshwork of real and imagined spaces as well as internal and external architectures, all of which produce displacement, distortion and a doubling of time.
( 1 ) Halberstam, Jack: Wild Things: The disorder of desire, London, 2020, S.12
The Bacchae is a Wild Reading List compiled by Sharon Kivland by invitation of Anna R. Winder on the occasion of the exhibition Scrambled Ontologies: A Fabulation curated by Victoria Tarak at Sies + Höke. Free to download, here
For further information on the exhibited artworks please contact us at post@sieshoeke.com
Zoe Leonard, Untitled (passage from Al río / To the River #1), 2017/2021 (detail); Grupo Mexa, Putz Bahia, 2019; Mary Bauermeister, Aus der Serie „Air Condition Nightmare“, 1967 - 1969 (detail); Glaskosmos I, 2019
Anna R. Winder, Grinder, 2022; Dancing processer, 2022; Zoe Leonard, Untitled (passage from Al río / To the River #1), 2017/2021
Anna R. Winder, Constellation wheel, 2022; Grinder, 2022; Dancing processer, 2022
Zoe Leonard, Untitled (passage from Al río / To the River #1), 2017/2021 (detail); Grupo Mexa, Putz Bahia, 2019; window: Mary Bauermeister, Glaskosmos III, 2012; Glaskosmos II*
Mary Bauermeister, Aus der Serie „Air Condition Nightmare“, 1967 - 1969
Yalda Afsah, Hug_3, 2022; Hug_4, 2022
Jorge Loureiro, Who will save the lazy sperm?, 2021; — No fundo...No fundo do fundo... — No fundo, no fundo..., 2022; Noch kein Titel, 2020; A.L. Steiner + robbinschilds, C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience), Part I, 2007; Mary Bauermeister, Horizonal Sculpture, 1986 / 2022
Jorge Loureiro, Who will save the lazy sperm?, 2021; A.L. Steiner + robbinschilds, C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience), Part I, 2007