On the Far Side of the Marchlands was an exhibition co-produced by Morehshin Allahyari, Cathrine Disney, Keeley Haftner, Brittany Ransom and Daniel Rourke.
The exhibition at Schering Stiftung gallery featured a zoo of hybrid figures: from stupid/intelligent insects to short-sighted/forward-thinking posthumans; from chimera materials that ooze, respire and transmute, to murky politics impossible to clarify as either positive or negative. On the Far Side of the Marchlands expanded on the material and conceptual hybridity expressed in The 3D Additivist Cookbook: a compendium of provocative projects by over one hundred artists, activists, and theorists concerned with ‘Additivist’ practices. The exhibition and Cookbook invited visitors to look beyond boundaries, speaking to a growing need for radical forms of transformation.
A ‘marchland’ is a medieval term for a space between two or more realms; a zone betwixt the control of states, in which alternate rules of law and conduct might apply. On the Far Side of the Marchlands explores the potential of radically new topographies – “intertwined histories and overlapping territories”[1] – composed of hybrid realms of experience, culture and materiality. The world can no longer be considered a singular thing. Rather there are worlds – plural – caught in a web of social, technological and what might once have been considered ‘natural’ aspects, tensions and forms; a profusion of networks in which the processes and behaviours we call ‘life’ must also become plural.
The 3D Additivist Cookbook, conceived and edited by Daniel Rourke & Morehshin Allahyari, is also presented in the exhibition alien matter (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2 February – 5 March 2017), curated by Inke Arns, as part of ever elusive – thirty years of transmediale.
Photos by Luca Girardini and Julia Zimmermann. More can be found here.
[1] Palestinian political thinker Edward Said famously described the ‘intertwined histories and overlapping territories’ of Britain and its former Empire as an ‘Imaginative Geography’.
