While the world outside keeps staggering into its algorithmic depression, a different fire burns at Kunstraum Memphis.‍

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Bhima Griem calls for a participatory exhibition: process instead of product, transition instead of state, controversy instead of consensus.

The exhibition unfolds as a process – no finished work but an ongoing experiment. For three weeks the Kunstraum becomes an expanded space: studio, kitchen, bedroom, living room – and above all a stage for performances, conversations, rituals, installations. The programme is fleeting, unpredictable, and announced only shortly before each action via messaging services.

The time around 31 October is no coincidence. In the context of so-called neopaganism, Samhain marks a threshold: the time when the veil between worlds grows thin, when contact with ancestors, spirits – and perhaps also future utopias – seems possible. Rituals such as fire ceremonies, protective circles or the burning of herbs are understood and used here not as esoteric folklore but as material for contemporary artistic practice. Thus arises an open, many-voiced space in which the non-conforming stands for wilfulness, sharpened perception and the capacity to imagine alternative possibilities within the present – beyond role constraints and cultural ascriptions, and clearly apart from all forms of nationalist, völkisch or exclusionary ideology.

The use of ritual practices – historically linked with ideas of magic, sorcery or witchcraft – here becomes a tool for critical engagement with the present. When neoliberal realpolitik knows only the language of wars, crises and states of emergency, symbolic, anarchic acts become the counter-agent. They create the possibility of open, affirmative negotiation at a time when hope in the feuilletons appears mostly as an ironic footnote.

The Kunstraum becomes a temporary counter-space: open, contradictory, permeable. Whoever comes here may witness moments that oscillate between political ritual and artistic experiment – and perhaps also glimpse hope for a future without hashtags.

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Bhima Griem
Chris Korda
Eileen Lofink
Dan Perjovschi
Anne Retzlaff
Leonie Terschüren