NYAB Event - Peter Wächtler "B.A.C.K."

Peter Wächtler "B.A.C.K."

Ludlow 38 / The Goethe-Institut New York

This event has ended.

MINI/Goethe-Institut Curatorial Residencies Ludlow 38 presents Peter Wächtler's first exhibition in the United States. B.A.C.K. will feature new work by the artist, produced in collaboration with Kunsthalle Wien.

Peter Wächtler creates narrative works in a wide range of media, drawing on various formats and genres of storytelling. At a moment when narrating experiences seems more important than having them, and when such narrating takes on increasingly administrative forms, his works foreground the functioning of different narrative techniques and traditions as means of rationalizing one’s place in the world, of grappling with and giving meaning to one’s existence.

The first-person narrators of Wächtler’s stories occupy positions of contemplative distance and passivity towards the world. Often they speak from the vantage point of death when they muse about their lives, recalling formative experiences and decisive moments. Even those who are alive seem paralyzed—functioning or malfunctioning within their world, but unable to act upon it.

Wächtler’s nightmarish scenarios oscillate between ironic distantiation and dead seriousness. Emphatically and poetically inhabiting the genres in question, but at the same time applying devices such as exaggeration, deadpan humor, an excessive vividness, a jumbling up of narrative conventions, and a decidedly German use of the English language, Wächtler generates an uncomfortable tension between distance and identification.
Unlike in the myths of personality development, fate, destiny, and so on, which Wächtler’s stories mime, the social totality here creeps into the picture. Subjects appear as products of social formations, their codes and rituals denaturalized. In Wächtler’s stories, hollowed out phrases from the repertoire of communication agencies and shallow love songs are made to speak beautifully of a world that is not, and critical theory proves as potent a means for territorial fights as fists or a kryptonite bicycle lock.