Anselm Franke

The Third House: The Language of the Essay - Exhibition

The following texts that comprise this thesis, parts of which are re-written from curatorial entries from books and catalogues, is not so much a text about a series of exhibitions, but an essential part of my overall practice.

Content wise, the core of this practice is seeking an understanding of the pitfalls of what I relate to as the positivism of the exhibition. Once we come to terms with this positivism, the exhibition is presented as space in which boundary-making techniques both of a micro- and macro-scale can be investigated and disarmed.

In attempting to show how different “practices of division” — that range from the social through the architectural to the geopolitical — are constitutive of the social in modernity, the exhibitions that I have curated have investigated the effects that particular boundary-making practices have on the constitution of sociality in modernity, and how such sociality, understood as the making of social relations and of society, produces a sphere of mediality, which is furthermore intimately connected with technological infrastructures and media.

I attempted to explore how these have been operated by systems of representation and narrative/mythical patterns, whose constitutive exclusions return as symptoms in the realm of the imaginary and the visual.

Anselm is a member of Roundtable one.