Open call group show

Exhibiting artists: Anja Asche, Eric Beier, Gyde Becker, Niina Lehtonen Braun, Kuno Ebert, Barbara Eitel, Albrecht Ferch, Nathalie Giraud, Sabine Hilscher, Mareike Jacobi, Kerstin von Klein, Irina Novarese, Nike Ossler, Franziska Peter, Julia Pitschmann, Holger Pohl, Katharina Poos, Janis Schroeder, Sabine Schründer, Min Sook, Lorina Speder, Anna Staffel, Christina Stark, Manuel Tozzi, Urun Unal und Babette Werth

Exhibiting artists: Anja Asche, Eric Beier, Gyde Becker, Niina Lehtonen Braun, Kuno Ebert, Barbara Eitel, Albrecht Ferch, Nathalie Giraud, Sabine Hilscher, Mareike Jacobi, Kerstin von Klein, Irina Novarese, Nike Ossler, Franziska Peter, Julia Pitschmann, Holger Pohl, Katharina Poos, Janis Schroeder, Sabine Schründer, Min Sook, Lorina Speder, Anna Staffel, Christina Stark, Manuel Tozzi, Urun Unal und Babette Werth

This year’s Open Call exhibition on „Freedom“ runs from 25.06.22 – 30.07.22. The opening will take place on Saturday, 25.06.2022 from 7 pm.

Freedom: A fine line

Freedom is a precarious commodity that must always be conquered, fought for, preserved, protected and defended anew. The arts are considered the noblest area of freedom: playfully and without purpose, art offers a space in which the taboo, the unrealistic, the purposeless, the utopian and the dystopian, the insane and the everyday are tested, questioned, turned on their head, illuminated and played out. In times when the world is in ruins, art is allowed to turn to the beautiful. In times when the rhythm of functioning keeps the world in time, art may experiment with dystopias and dysfunctions.
But freedom is under powerful pressure, and not just in states where dissident expression is sanctioned, birth rates are controlled, and artists are muzzled. Even where established democracies safeguard freedom and artistic practice has no limits, if not moral ones, we are re-examining our relationship with freedom. Here the danger grows from within: If everything is possible, doesn’t freedom degenerate into arbitrariness and caprice? How autonomous and subversive is an art from which the world expects new utopias and designs, since it itself has run out of imagination and hope? What happens to freedom in science, art, and culture when words, phrases, and people are disinvited from discourse and the public stage? What impulse does this sanctioning follow, and with what coercion can it be met to restore the old freedom? Even the call for freedom can turn into ideology.
What seems free to the outside world can feel coercive and unfree. Even the freedom to be oneself can petrify into a commandment. And perhaps duty, the very opposite of freedom, is the path to freedom, to an attitude in which we act morally and choose to live as free human beings rather than controlled automatons?
What we negotiate and exhibit under the theme of „freedom“ asks where freedom shows itself, where it arises and where it has disappeared. In doing so, we are interested in the threshold and the tipping point that intertwines freedom and unfreedom, as well as the contrast between free and imprisoned, the infinite longing for freedom and the question of autonomy, which cannot be thought of without responsibility.

(Text June 2021, Anna Krewani for SCOTTY)

The artist run space SCOTTY offers artists and curators an open platform for exhibitions, alternative formats of arts education and interdisciplinary projects. The project space is independent of the market, self-determined and free of hierarchy free. The subject matter of SCOTTY’s work is based on annual themes / focal points, which are defined for a period of one to one and a half years.