Don’t TOUCH ME : Acts of faith
Group Exhibition
13 SEPTEMBER – 20 OCTOBER 2019
Curated by Precious Okoyomon & Quinn Harrelson Artists: Santiago Alvarez Artists: Janine Antoni, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Koo Jeong A, Anne Boyer, CAConrad, Chuquimamani-Condori, Hayden Dunham, Bracha L. Ettinger, Hamishi Farah, Che Gossett, Barbara Hammer, Hardy Hill, Pierre Huyghe, Fred Moten, Eileen Myles, Precious Okoyomon and Puppies Puppies, Richie Scandalito, Aviva Silverman, Diamond Stingily, Dana Ward, Purvis Young
Group Exhibition:
Santiago Alvarez Artists: Janine Antoni, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Koo Jeong A, Anne Boyer, CAConrad, Chuquimamani-Condori, Hayden Dunham, Bracha L. Ettinger, Hamishi Farah, Che Gossett, Barbara Hammer, Hardy Hill, Pierre Huyghe, Fred Moten, Eileen Myles, Precious Okoyomon and Puppies Puppies, Richie Scandalito, Aviva Silverman, Diamond Stingily, Dana Ward, Purvis Young
Don’t Touch Me: Acts of Faith
Robert Grunenberg, Curated by Precious Okoyomon & Quinn Harrelson
13.09.2019 – 20.10.2019
Noli me tangere (‘touch me not) is the Latin translation of a phrase spoken, according to John 20:17, by Jesus to Mary Magdalene when she recognized him immediately after his resurrection. According to Maurice Zundel, in asking Mary Magdalene not to touch him, Jesus indicates that once the resurrection is accomplished, the link between human beings and his person must no longer be physical, but must be a bond of heart to heart. “He must establish this gap, she must understand that the only possible way is faith, that the hands can not reach the person and that it is from within, from within only, that we can approach Him.”
Perhaps technology’s most profoundly obvious impact on our textural experience of the last thirty years is a major redefinition of our gestural relationship to the world at large. The finger, or the digit (al), has become the actor that mediates almost all our interaction with space both virtual and otherwise, and the body, following suit, has relocated cognition to the divisible instrument.
In the age of the touch screen, one is always gesturing at or towards, and paradoxically never in fact touching. Tracing a history of our tactical or haptic entanglements with the sublime beyonds of the digital and the divine, Don’t Touch Me: Acts of Faith attempts to disinter collective infrastructures of belief and topologies of faith.
The exhibition is an attempt to index and archive contemporary art’s rising entanglement with animism, theology, and notions of fait. At the backdrop of this development the show endeavors to look at a history of touch, contact, gesture, and entanglement and to through it examine shifting spiritual valences and political implications around religion and the virtual.
The finger, or the digit (al), has become the actor that mediates almost all our interaction with space both virtual and otherwise, and the body, following suit, has relocated cognition to the divisible instrument. In the age of the touch screen, one is always gesturing at or towards, and paradoxically never in fact touching. Tracing a history of our tactical or haptic entanglements with the sublime beyonds of the digital and the divine, Don’t Touch Me: Acts of Faith attempts to disinter collective infrastructures of belief and topologies of faith.
For more information, please contact the gallery: mail@robertgrunenberg.com