Charim Galerie Wien curated by Nicholas Tammens
„Insolvency, my friend“

Nicholas Tammens (b. Australia) is the Assistant Curator at Kunstverein Hamburg. He is also founder of 1856, a curated program of exhibitions and events at a workers’ union parliament in Melbourne, Australia which focuses on conditions of labour and cultural production. He has produced exhibitions such as LaToya Ruby Frazier, Kunstverein in Hamburg (2022), Stars Down to Earth (with Sung Tieu), Galerie Barbara Weiss (2021), Jef Geys, Yale Union (2018), Patricia L. Boyd, 1856 (2018), Fred Lonidier, 1856 (2017), and B. Wurtz (2015); presented talks at Kunsthal Bergen (2021), Wiels, Brussels (2019), and Kunsthalle Zurich (2019); and has wrote for Mousse Magazine (Milan) and May Revue (Paris).

This exhibition started with Pierre Klossowski’s essay “Living Currency” as a point of interest, with the premise that the body and its attendant desires act as units of exchange. It departed into a series of associations between artists and works that includes pieces by Olga Balema, Dora Budor, Georg Herold, Pierre Klossowski, Guy Mees, Josephine Pryde, Rosemarie Trockel, Camilla Wills, and a film by Guillaume Dustan. These works at once bear and disrupt material traces of economic and libidinal systems, without losing sight of the position of the artist, the work, and its spectator in relation to them. They ask us to look at what governs relations of production and reproduction, which logics are at play, and what fails to be assimilated into their systems. From here we might see what they categorise as useless, spent, as well as their erotics, their waste, their gaps, their exhaustion, their ubiquity, their omnipotence, their invisibility.