Aktionshaus, Berlin
24 June - 25 July 2025
preview
press release, floorplan and checklist
Crisis of Representation - companion text to The Joys
Precarity & Grace Audio Service - exhibition soundscape
A Divagation - Gabriela Acha on The Joys
Photos by Max Eulitz and Marc Gemini
For the epigraph of his 1974 book Libidinal Economy, Jean François Lyotard adopted a slightly reworked version of a sentence originally appearing in Stendhal’s 1822 De l'Amour, specifically in a chapter entitled ‘Des Courts’. Inscribing his “livre méchant” in the conviction that “[w]ho knows not how to hide knows not how to love,” Lyotard acknowledges concealment as a crucial and generative force underlying the non-plus-ultra of relations. Somewhat similarly yet with drastically divergent consequences, what Stendhal had found in the Provençal tradition of courtly love poetry and conception of “amor de lonh” (distant love) was an exemplary form for his own theory of ‘crystallization:’ the process by which lovers work in absence, idealizing their beloved through imagination and psychosomatic projection and eventually establishing perfect objects of desire (and sustainment). The Joys emerges from this complex libidinal genealogy as an attempt to expose intimacy’s double role: generation and establishment. It does so by folding and unfolding as a vibrating, semantic and material field where intimate interaction and institutioning converge.
— excerpt from the exhibition preview by Aktionshaus
2025
water, plexiglass, lilies, peonies
254 x 130 x 11 cm
2025
water, plexiglass, lilies, peonies
254 x 130 x 11 cm
2025
water, plexiglass, lilies, peonies
254 x 130 x 11 cm
2025
archival inkjet print on cotton rag, pvc, synthetic sweat
70 x 100 cm
2025
office carrier envelope
29.7 x 42 cm (framed)
2025
sound system, plexiglass, water-based dye ink, sound mix (5 hour 41 minutes loop)
dimensions unavailable
2025
15 office inkjet transfers on untreated UPG 400 grit sanding paper; 15 archival inkjet prints on recycled office paper and vellum; 1 internal angle
18 x 24 cm each (framed)
2025
15 office inkjet transfers on untreated UPG 400 grit sanding paper; 15 archival inkjet prints on recycled office paper and vellum; 1 internal angle
18 x 24 cm each (framed)
2025
15 office inkjet transfers on untreated UPG 400 grit sanding paper; 15 archival inkjet prints on recycled office paper and vellum; 1 internal angle
18 x 24 cm each (framed)
2025
15 office inkjet transfers on untreated UPG 400 grit sanding paper; 15 archival inkjet prints on recycled office paper and vellum; 1 internal angle
18 x 24 cm each (framed)
2025
15 office inkjet transfers on untreated UPG 400 grit sanding paper; 15 archival inkjet prints on recycled office paper and vellum; 1 internal angle
18 x 24 cm each (framed)
2025
sound system, plexiglass, water-based dye ink, sound mix (5 hour 41 minutes loop)
dimensions unavailable
2025
archival inkjet print on cotton rag
21 x 29.7 cm
2025
sound system, plexiglass, water-based dye ink, sound mix (5 hour 41 minutes loop)
dimensions unavailable
2025
stainless steel, synthetic lace, office light
127 x 46 x 12 cm
2025
plexiglass, nacre, synthetic sweat
180 x 75 x 7 cm
2025
plexiglass, nacre, synthetic sweat
180 x 75 x 7 cm
2025
plexiglass, nacre, synthetic sweat
180 x 75 x 7 cm
2025
plexiglass, washi tape, aluminum
75 x 50 x 7 cm
2025
archival inkjet print on cotton rag
21 x 29.7 cm
2025
graph
dimensions variable
2025
archival inkjet print on cotton rag, gift wrapping foil, washi tape
84.1 x 118.9 cm
2025
archival inkjet print on cotton rag, gift wrapping foil, washi tape
84.1 x 118.9 cm
2025
fridge, bar, video, sound, collected objects
dimensions and duration variable
2025
fridge, bar, video, sound, collected objects
dimensions and duration variable