21.01.2010
Extra City
Kunsthal Antwerpen, Tulpstraat 79, BE-2060 Antwerp

22 January-2 May 2010
Opening hours during exhibition periods:
Wednesday–Sunday, 2-7pm and Thursday 2-8pm

Phantoms of Nabua features in the Animism exhibition alongside works by Walt Disney, Harun Farocki, Daria Martin and Jan Svankmajer amongst others.

Animism is a long-term exhibition and publication project first presented between 22 January and 2 May 2010 in Antwerp in a collaboration of Extra City Kunsthal Antwerpen and the Museum of Contemporary Art (M HKA). A second version of the exhibition will be shown at Kunsthalle Bern from May till July 2010. Subsequent versions will be developed at the Generali Foundation in Vienna and the House of World Cultures in Berlin in 2011 and 2012, respectively.

Animism has evolved around two opposed and yet complementary processes: animation and objectification. The exhibition meditates on the paradoxical status of objectification in modernity, its relation to conservation, mummification, and simultaneous re-animation and mobilization, and the forms of power relations it gives rise to. It puts the modern imaginary of inanimate matter and reification under critical scrutiny, and questions the economies of ‘transgression’ that have long informed modern aesthetics of enchantment and disenchantment.

By placing selected historical references next to contemporary work, Animism brings together works that reflect and negotiate the boundary between the subjective and the objective. Across the registers of technological media, moving images, depictions of life and embodiment, the exhibition questions the mimetic processes of modern aesthetics as ways to negotiate and, often paradoxically, confirm and maintain the imaginary oppositions of modernity.

Films