that other world, the world of the teapot. tenderness, a model

June 25–September 25, 2022
Grand opening ceremony: June 24, 7–11:59pm

**that other world, the world of the teapot tenderness, a model

that other world, the world of the teapot, is the world the writer and the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature Laureate Olga Tokarczuk is longing for. In her Nobel Lecture, the author recalls Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale of a teapot, broken by the people's awkwardness and their carelessness, and immediately disposed of and rejected. Tokarczuk writes about her childhood world of fairy tales, inhabited by talking objects and nature manifesting its own existence and life. That's that other world, an enigmatic Raumgeist, an Aleph, where the entire visible and invisible world is combined in a utopian harmony and bond, whereas our world is a disconnected, lifeless expanse, colonized by loneliness and failure. To evoke that other world Tokarczuk advocates tenderness as a magical means thanks to which the misjudged and ignored teapot starts to talk. “Tenderness, writes the author, personalizes everything to which it relates, making it possible to give it a voice, to give it the space and the time to come into existence, and to be expressed.” She praises tenderness as the art of personifying, of sharing feelings, and thus endlessly discovering similarities; (it) “is the most modest form of love (…) It appears wherever we take a close and careful look at another being, at something that is not our ‘self’.”

that other world, the world of tenderness, “the conscious, though perhaps slightly melancholy, common sharing of fate”, asks for a new host, a new kind of narrator which Olga Tokarczuk identifies as a “fourth-person” one, the one “who manages to encompass the perspective of each of the characters, as well as having the capacity to step beyond the horizon of each of them, who sees more and has a wider view, and who is able to ignore time.” Tender narrator is a conscious homo empathicus, who practices critical intimacy and considers tenderness as “a way of looking that shows the world as being alive, living, interconnected, cooperating with, and codependent on itself.”

The exhibition is a search for such a tender narrator. As a manifesto of sorts, it is a portrait of tenderness as a desired, possible modus operandi for the world in an ontological crisis and doubt, its emergency alphabet of vulnerability, endurance and resilience. This is a cross-generational poetic landscape of tenderness as a transgressive, polyphonic tool of change and reinvention, a “spontaneous and disinterested” agent of care and concern, a model for the radical ethics in precarious times of reduced immunity and mistrust. Art works, assembled within a relational architecture of this exhibition, perform tenderness as a lyrical power of a political charge. From an approach to materials, through an elaboration of form and an application of color down to thematic take at human psyche and its fragility, here there is an investigation of surface sensations, an anatomy of caress and attention, an empathic journey into that other world, the world of the teapot Olga Tokarczuk dreamt of.

As such, this exhibition is a possibility of a new paradigm, an offer “to visit the other. The other, the tender—extend her, extend him. The proof of the tender is only in tending” (Jacques Derrida), a visit accompanied by a candid appearance by a Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, a tender narrator.

With Alexander Archipenko, Hans Arp, Lenora de Barros, Hans Bellmer, Renate Bertlmann, Ellen Cantor, Enrico David, Shannon Ebner, Cecilia Edefalk, Joana Escoval, Cerith Wyn Evans, Valie Export, Spencer Finch, Johan Grimonprez, Asta Gröting, Heide Hinrichs, Peter Hujar, Dorothy Iannone, Grethe Jürgens, Nikita Kadan, Arghavan Khosravi, Jakob Lena Knebl, Dominique Knowles, Jutta Koether, Käthe Kollwitz, Maria Lassnig, Fernand Léger, Jochen Lempert, Barbara Levittoux-Świderska, Yong Xiang Li, Sharon Lockhart, Louise Nevelson, Alice Neel, Kayode Ojo, Daniel Otero Torres, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Ewa Partum, Francis Picabia, Pamela Rosenkranz, Hans Savery II, Francesco Solimena, Friedrich Schröder Sonnenstern, Fabien Vallos, Edmund de Waal.