“Fear of Property” at The Renaissance Society, Chicago
Residence: some thing protected or shared or forcefully taken, one thing attained or dropped or preferred or liked. Private property performs a job in effectively-staying, some philosophers have argued, but it’s also been the basis for all types of exploitation, as record has revealed. Either way, so a great deal has come to rest on this thought. It’s an summary notion that shapes concrete actuality in profound techniques, shadowed by questions of who owns what, and why, and the friction of general public and personal passions. As time goes by, property also comes in a lot of various kinds: some are actual physical, other individuals significantly intangible, some deeply familiar and many others foremost toward mysterious horizons.
“Fear of Property” develops out of ongoing conversations with artists around these concepts, numerous similar histories and emerging futures, and a array of lived experiences in among. The exhibition also step by step builds on the instinct that residence organizes not only social and economic relations, but dimensions of emotional life nowadays as nicely. The works on check out have their own exclusive contours of sensation as these, even as they attract out concerns all around ownership and company, land and the structures we inhabit, caretaking, lifestyle and language, artificial intelligence, and a lot more. And some of them may possibly trace at ways of remaining in the earth that are not framed in conditions of “property” at all.
The exhibition title alone is drawn from an essay by cultural anthropologist Cameron Hu, in which he speaks to the fundamental logics of futures investing though reflecting on the work of artists Marissa Benedict, Daniel de Paula, and David Rueter. His closing insight in that essay, a “fear of home,” factors to disembodied financial innovations that nevertheless ripple outward nowadays. In this exhibition, his strategy opens up other paths for considered, too, spreading out into quite a few diverse contexts.
at The Renaissance Modern society, Chicago
until finally November 6, 2022