Object Oriented Democracy

Kuratorische Führung

Handle with Care is an exhibition on the go, accompanied by a series of meditations in which an unremarkable travel suitcase carries over 30 artistic projects inspired by family archives from Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Along its journey through Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, Georgia, France, Austria, and Germany.

The suitcase makes twelve stops, actively inviting further artists and collaborators to join. It 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 private archives as well as in vernacular photography is a fruitful soil for meaning-making and a possibility for healing. As a form of micro-memory and mundane domestic practice, family collections were often overseen by authorities in the past and thus managed to collect material and visual traces of human experiences and contexts that would otherwise have been lost. Handle with Care presents both a journey of a growing visual collection on the one hand, and the path of a suitcase as an item of infrastructural research into human disconnections and connections on the other. 

The project deals with the questions: Who can afford to have an archive? How do we preserve objects and their stories in a never ending state of rupture? What role may an artist play in this memory practice?

Project realization: This exhibition is part of "Object Oriented Democracy," curated and organized by Manana Bold e.V.

Team: Lilit Matevosyan, Gulshat Gubaidullina, V-L-V-SH-M-D, Vladimir Seleznev, Katya Selezneva, Irina Denkmann
Curator: Irina Denkmann
Design: Denis (Gafiyatullin) Volkov
Illustration: Gulshat Gubaidullina, Denis (Gafiyatullin) Volkov
Exhibition is part of Object Oriented Democracy, curated and organized by Manana Bold e.V. Space: Jacqueline Jakobi Millán, Alte Schmelze (Gutleutstr. 294, Frankfurt am Main)