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Tools for Conviviality
 
Etienne et Emanuelle aus dem Werkzyklus "Tools For Conviviality"
Anna Ehrenstein mit Awa Seck, DonKafele, Lydia Likibi, Saliou Ba, Nyamwathi Gichau
Foto: courtesy the artist, Office Impart and KOW Berlin
 

Anna Ehrenstein »

 

Tools for Conviviality

 
16 October 2021 – 27 February 2022
 
Opening: Friday, 15 October 2021, 7pm
 
 

Francisco Carolinum Linz

Museumstr. 14, A-4020 Linz
T +43 (0)732-7720 522 00

www.ooekultur.at
Tue-Sun 10am-6pm
Francisco Carolinum Linz
 
 
Tools for Conviviality
 
Abdourahmane aus dem Werkzyklus "Tools For Conviviality"
Anna Ehrenstein mit Awa Seck, DonKafele, Lydia Likibi, Saliou Ba, Nyamwathi Gichau
Foto: courtesy the artist, Office Impart and KOW Berlin
 
 
Anna Ehrenstein (b. 1993) found inspiration for her Tools for Conviviality during extended stays in Dakar in 2018 and 2019. In the Senegalese capital the artist met Saliou Ba, Donkafele (Mandé Mory Bah and Thibault Houssou), Nyamwathi Gichau, Lydia Likibi, and Awa Seck, all of whom would become her friends and artistic collaborators.

Ehrenstein’s own migration experience between Germany and Albania sensitized her to the living conditions of her collaborators, who all migrated at various times to or from Senegal. She views Dakar as a special place that attracts a broad spectrum of Africa’s creative diversity, in part because it is possible to work there without a visa. The artists working in the city share a life in constant motion, along with their accumulated knowledge, their joie de vivre, and a common world they have themselves created.
 
 
Tools for Conviviality
 
Franceline aus dem Werkzyklus "Tools For Conviviality"
Anna Ehrenstein mit Awa Seck, DonKafele, Lydia Likibi, Saliou Ba, Nyamwathi Gichau
Foto: courtesy the artist, Office Impart and KOW Berlin
 
 
Anna Ehrenstein’s concept for this collaboration draws on the 1973 book Tools for Conviviality by the social critic Ivan Illich. She has taken Illich’s critique of Western industrialization and adapted it to the technocratic and neocolonial conditions of today’s digital world. "The idea that we are capable of changing how we use technology by taking advantage of what is all around us is central to Illich’s thesis and also to everyone on the team," says Ehrenstein.

For the museum rooms of the Francisco Carolinum (built between 1884-1892 by the architects Otto van Els and Bruno Schmitz), which are strongly influenced by the aesthetics of the Enlightenment, the artist built geodesic dome in which she shows a 360° video. Here she refers to Buckminster Fuller's dome architecture, which influenced the postwar critique of progress and became a classic of hippie architecture. She uses this juxtaposition of architectural concepts to raise questions. Inside the dome, textile sculptures, Cuddle Slugs, 2020, by artist Sunny Pfalzer become seating objects.
 
 
Tools for Conviviality
 
Nyamwathi Mandala aus dem Werkzyklus "Tools For Conviviality"
Anna Ehrenstein mit Awa Seck, DonKafele, Lydia Likibi, Saliou Ba und Nyamwathi Gichau
Foto: courtesy the artist, Office Impart and KOW Berlin
 
 
Through installations, photography, sculpture, and video, the artist addresses thematic complexes such as the relationship between necropolitics and material culture, as well as migration issues and networked imagery and ecosystems. Collaboration proves valuable here as a method for recontextualizing and thus overcoming divisions while embracing the lived reality of marginality and difference.

By staging what were once exclusively digital data and embodying them as three-dimensional "glitch assemblages" and written texts, Ehrenstein encourages a productive form of "collective unlearning."

The artist's remarks on the themes she deals with in Tools for Conviviality and a selection of relevant literature for the exhibition can be heard and read in an area designed by the art education department.

Tools for Conviviality was exhibited at C/O Berlin in 2021 on the occasion of the C/O Berlin Talent Award.
 
 
Tools for Conviviality
 
Videostill, 360° Video Arbeit aus dem Werkzyklus "Tools For Conviviality"
Anna Ehrenstein mit Awa Seck, DonKafele, Lydia Likibi, Saliou Ba, Nyamwathi Gichau
Foto: courtesy the artist, Office Impart and KOW Berlin
 
 
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