For Ever and Forever When I Move

With Enya Burger and Teresa Linhard

In his poem “Ulysses”, published in 1842, the Victorian writer Lord Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892) has an ageing Odysseus wistfully look back on his adventurous days on the high seas. Centuries later, Western explorers are once again setting sail. Their aim is not merely the expansion of Europe. Researchers and scientists are also searching for other treasures: biological samples are collected, from which scientific theories are developed that, from today’s perspective, sound just as mythical and fantastical as Odysseus’s adventures. Many of these seafarers were conquerors and occupiers who forcibly took possession of foreign territories, appropriated their cultural artefacts and brought them back to Europe. The experience of the violent expansion of the world view, which brought joy to Europe, went hand in hand with the suffering and oppression of indigenous societies, at whose expense the much-vaunted ‘equality’ of the Enlightenment was achieved.

In the exhibition “For Ever and Forever When I Move” – the title quotes a line from Tennyson’s poem, which describes the flow of movement of material, forms and knowledge across territorial boundaries and eras – the artists Enya Burger and Teresa Linhard present works in a wide variety of formats. With their materially contrasting approaches, the two graduates of the Düsseldorf Art Academy look back many centuries to depict motifs, stories and theories in their works that oscillate between fact and fiction, mythology and science. Their art allows us to recognise spaces that exist in-between – and provides us with images that can inspire us to reflect on our Eurocentric heritage.

Enya Burger has long been fascinated by viscous and fluid materials that elude any clearly definable form. She is particularly interested in slime, secretions and fungus-like structures, which are often culturally associated with revulsion, aversion and ambiguity. These are substances that spread, adapt and interconnect, thereby subverting the notion of stability and unambiguity upon which many cultural and scientific systems of classification are based. In her work, Burger explores how specific images, affects and forms of knowledge are formed in relation to precisely these materials, and how they navigate the space between science, fiction and myth. In her work, fluidity becomes a medium of transition: rigid divisions between body and environment, nature and technology, inside and outside are subverted. To investigate these fluid materials, tools for measuring, testing or classifying are necessary, which we find in her installations.

In her work, Teresa Linhard employs craft techniques based on textile processes. Her paintings on wood, for example, are created using methods borrowed from batik. Her research focuses on European Chinoiserie and the counter-concept of 18th-century Chinese Europerie. The dawn of the Enlightenment and globalisation marks a brief moment in European history when medieval, partly mythical imaginations overlapped with ‘scientific’ thinking. European interest in China gave rise to a distinct visual language, Chinoiserie, which was linked less to the actual China of that era than to European projections and yearnings. Individual motifs can be traced back to woodcuts in Chinese popular art. Conversely, China remained largely unimpressed by contact with European traders and missionaries; only isolated Western design principles, such as central perspective, found their way into Chinese modes of representation. Drawing on Byung-Chul Han’s essay Shanzhai. Deconstruction in Chinese, Linhard approaches the subject through the sensitive copying of historical models. She brings both perspectives into a contemporary dialogue and demonstrates that narratives always also make statements about the ideas and longings of one’s own culture.

Curator: Jessica Aydin