Independence Day II
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Curators: Orian Durand & Line Ebert

The exhibition title Independence Day II, refers to the eponymous 2015 Hollywood film sequel. Similarly, the concept of the exhibition aligns itself to a simple outline of the film’s narrative; individuals from every horizon and country of the world join together in order to defeat a monstrous and malevolent alien kind, representing the invading and greater Other.

The narrative, as we understand it, is a clear caricature of a specific trope, in which the humankind, when facing an external threat, becomes small and powerless and all its technological advances render useless. However, as humanity starts uniting, lead forward by a few heroic individuals, the summoned forces amounts to unexpected potency. As a trope, it deals with the realization of human insignificance in a greater perspective. A parallel metaphor to this idea can be found in the way ants behave: alone they cannot do much, whereas together, they build a productive social system. Understood through this principle of unity, smallness does not correlate to fragility and its size as such doesn’t matter; what counts is the joint energy of an organization of the many in a spontaneous order. The exhibition is interested in this psychological compound of activity and effect of the seemingly insignificant and plentiful.

In this regard, Independence Day II is occupied with a recent spreading gesture in the young contemporary art context around miniaturized ecosystems and attempts to insert this tendency in a discursive frame. How can smaller entities express something powerful, threatening, magical or even terrible? Or in what way might it be a reaction to a current social and political situation? These are questions that are ardent for us.

Within an aesthetic that contains a trajectory between something archaic and science fictional, a distorted Arcadian vision and dystopian hybrid intelligences, Independence Day II presents works by Julia Bondesson (*1983 in Kinnared, lives in Killeberg, Sweden), Mimosa Echard (*1986 in Alès, France, lives in Paris), Veit Laurent Kurz (*1985 in Erbach, Germany, lives in Berlin), Rodrigo Hernandez (*1983 in Mexico City, lives in Basel) and Lea von Wintzingerode(*1990 in Bayreuth, Germany, lives in Berlin).