The collective exhibition “Ein Loch im Meer” [A Hole in the Sea] will be on view from May 21 to August 21, 2016, at Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart. There will be a private view on Friday, May 20, at 7:00pm and an Artists’ Tour at 2:00pm on Saturday, May 21; director Hans D. Christ, Anglo-Guyanese artist Hew Locke, and others will talk about their work inside the exhibition. Open to the public. The gallery is located at Schlossplatz 2, D-70173 Stuttgart, Germany.

Artists include Zbynek Baladrán, George Brecht, Matthew Buckingham, Annalisa Cannito, Chen Chieh-jen, Tacita Dean, Barry Flanagan, Sven Johne, Zoe Leonard, Pia Linz, Mehreen Murtaza, Lisa Rave, Julia Rometti / Victor Costales, and Cristian Rusu, amongst others.

Decsription (Excerpt): The title pays homage to an intervention by the British conceptual artist Barry Flanagan, who in 1969 made a hole in the sea for Gerry Schum’s Fernsehgalerie (the Land Art show). At low tide, he installed a Plexiglas cylinder in a tidal mud flat, which he then filmed from above as the tide came in. For a brief instant a hole in the sea emerged—before disappearing again in the swirling torrent of water.

Taking as a point of departure this volatile, paradoxical image—with the formal permeation of two highly elusive things like a hole and the sea, both of which represent a certain negativity, the end of something, a boundary—the exhibition is devoted to inconceivability and apparent controllability, poetics and (geo)politics of space related to sea, land, and air.

Cartography, grids, and navigation are just as relevant here as nationalism and colonialism, trade routes and piracy, migration and tourism. Probed are the geopolitical power relations that are triggered by methods surveying, classification, and delimitation—along with the potentialities and forms of the subversion, reversal, and dissolution of these relations that have always been unstable. [. . .]

To contact the gallery, see Info@wkv-stuttgart.de or call +49 (0)711 – 22 33 70.

For more information, see http://www.wkv-stuttgart.de/en/program/2016/exhibitions/a-hole-in-the-sea/

[Photo above: Detail of “Sea Power” by Hew Locke, 2014. Beads, cord, glue. Originally commissioned for Kochi-Muziris Biennale, photo © Indra Khanna.]