Due to pandemic related restricted travel regulations the original schedule of the international art exchange program 隱引 ANACHORESIS had to be postponed and reorganised. The basic structure of 隱引 ANACHORESIS forms an interdisciplinary dialogue between all participants.
Artworks, artistic concepts and their fragments form the basis for a mutual exchange and will begin already 12 months before the first meeting of the participants in spring 2022 with the pro-workshop online project »DRAFTS«.
During the project phase of »DRAFTS«, throughout 2021, each of the twelve artists will be invited to propose one or more questions, respectively statements to the group to which the other artists can respond in any open form, e.g. through an artistic draft. The artistic means of these drafts can be freely chosen by each artist and are unlimited.
Multiple rounds will be initiated during the course of »DRAFTS«. All the resulting artistic drafts will be collected and arranged in pairs or otherwise sorted groups and published on the project’s homepage and its further online channels in a regular sequence.
隱引 ANACHORESIS is a cooperation project with 20 participants from Taiwan and NRW in both countries from 2021-2023 and will be concluded with a comprehensive trilingual publication. The basic structure of 隱引 ANACHORESIS is an asymmetrical and collaborative dialogue between all participants. These are 12 pre-selected contemporary artists from Germany and Taiwan and two art scholars, one from each country.
If artists are seen as creators of special spaces, their potential could be seen in creating places where intimate temporal communities can emerge across vast geographical-cultural distances. By working together and taking an interest in others, they create counter forces to tendencies of isolation, protectionism and resurgent nationalism.
According to Roland Barthes, "anachoresis" is "the embryonic form of idiorrhythmia", a life form of a monastic collective in which the independence of the individual is preserved in the communality of the group. 隱引 ANACHORESIS would like to elevate art itself to the vocabulary of a dialogue between artists. The basis is a deliberately asymmetrical dialogue - or rather polylogue - among the participants, which develops through fragments brought along by the participants based on their own works and is continued in a successive sequence of theoretical reflection and studio phases, as a reaction to the fragment of the respective other artist. The procedure of "guided improvisation" in contemporary theatre/dance creates the matrix for this temporary, transnational "artist-collective-space". The vocabulary in this dialogue is the fragments from works of the participating artists.
The project seeks to create time and space for practical encounter and theoretical exchange, For once not in the public environment of a finished exhibition or art festival, but in the (semi-)public space of the laboratory or academy. The unique experimental feature of 隱 引 ANACHORESIS lies in its dialectical structure between retreat and publishing, as well in a conscious departure from classical publishing strategies and curatorial interventions. (no exhibtion, no curators) Today more than ever, art is called upon to construct a now that emerges from the direct critical engagement of diverse minds. The movements across social spaces that constitute the transnational are the main axes along which the social meaning of art is presented here. The confluence of geo-politically diverse forms of social experience, exhibited within the parameters of a shared world, hopefully allows a critical exchange about the ontology of contemporary art today.