Object Oriented Democracy

Handle with Care

Handle with Care is an exhibition on the go accompanied by a series of meditations. A seemingly unremarkable travel suitcase carries six artistic projects inspired by family archives, created by artists Lilit Matevosyan, Gulshat Gubaidullina, V-L-V-SH-M-D, Vladimir Seleznev and Katya Selezneva, and Denis (Gafiyatullin) Volkov. Along its journey through Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Georgia, France, Austria, and Germany, the suitcase makes stops, actively inviting further artists and collaborators to join. The exhibition engages with local communities, and gathers new artistic voices to be shown together in a final exhibition in Frankfurt am Main. 

The presence and absence in family archives, as well as in vernacular photography as a whole, are fruitful soil for meaning-making. As a form of micro-memory and mundane domestic practice, the medium of the family archive was often overseen by authorities in the past and thus managed to collect material and visual traces of human experiences and contexts. Handle with Care is a journey of a growing visual collection on the one hand, and the path of a suitcase as an infrastructural research into human dis- and connections on the other. The project deals with questions: Who can afford to have an archive? How do we preserve objects that are interchangeable in their value? What role may an artist play in this memory practice?

Lilit Matevosyan, Gulshat Gubaidullina, V-L-V-SH-M-D, Vladimir Seleznev, Irina Denkmann, Katya Selezneva, and Denis (Gafiyatullin) Volkov.