Identification, Desire, Mutuality

Slought is pleased to announce Identification, Desire, Mutuality, a conversation between Carrie Schneider and Kaja Silverman exploring relations and figures in photographic space, on Thursday, November 30, 2017, from 6-8pm. The talk will focus on Schneider's solo works, including Las Bebidas, Recession, Derelict Self, Reading Women, Summer Drawings, as well as Silverman's formulation of analogy as a way for us to relate to each other. This conversation is linked to More than Private, an exhibition of Schneider's work, curated by Silverman, that is currently on view at Slought. More than Private will close on December 13.

Although Schneider, like many of her peers, is a politically engaged artist, she differs from them in one striking way: she backs away from the abstract terms through which we conceptualize our "togetherness"—"masses," "public," "people," and even adjectives like "plural," and "collective." She gravitates instead to objects, activities, experiences and conditions that are saturated with private meanings, and that might therefore be seen as a-political. "Solitude," "intimacy," and "interiority" are her signature concerns. None of the works in this show, though, is private in the way property is supposed to be—that "belongs to," or exists "for the use of one particular person or group of people." There is also no work in this exhibition that is private in the way a person is supposed to be—complete, autonomous, and self-referential.

It is perhaps for this reason that we never feel that we are violating someone's privacy when we are looking at Schneider's work, even when the topic is something as "off limits" as the incest taboo. In fact, the opposite, is true: even at their most personal, the issues at the heart of Schneider's work are always"more than just private." This last concept comes from a 1925 letter from Rainer Maria Rilke, who had been living in a remote Swiss castle for six years, but had recently come to think of his writing as "more than just a private event." It is in a much earlier letter, though, that he offers his richest elaboration of this concept, and the one that—in its emphasis both on reading, and on the relational possibilities inherent in our childhood memories—is the most relevant to this show."One person or another would read what especially struck home to him in [the inexhaustible pages of Swann's Way]," Rilke writes, "and would hold it out in a specific way to the general opinion...and to many a one his own childhood would appear out of half-oblivion, and one would pass from tale to tale far into the summer night, but also far into the mutually rich true and alive." Mutually rich. Mutually true. Mutually alive. It would be hard to imagine a better description of Carrie Schneider's work, or of the kind of political engagement that it promotes.