Reading: Peter Wächtler

As part of the exhibition The Promise, artist Peter Wächtler will read a new text.

Passivity and contemplation characterize the narrators of Peter Wächtler’s stories. Some speak from the vantage point of death, musing about their lives, recalling formative experiences and decisive moments. Those still alive seem paralyzed—functioning or malfunctioning within their world, but unable to act upon it. At a moment when narrating experiences seems more important than having them, and when such narrating takes on increasingly standardized forms, Wächtler’s writing foregrounds 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. Unlike the various fatalist and voluntarist doctrines which these stories mime, the social totality here creeps into the picture. Fate turns into slapstick and only as such conveys the horror of life in an administered world. Hollowed-out phrases from the repertoire of communication agencies and shallow love songs are made to speak beautifully of a world that is not.

In The Promise, Peter Wächtler shows two bronze sculptures of residential tower blocks.

Peter Wächtler (1979) has recently had solo exhibitions at Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin, M HKA, Antwerp (both 2017), Chisenhale Gallery, London, Renassaince Society, Chicago (both 2016), Reena Spaulings, New York, Westfälischer Kunstverein, Munster (2014), and dépendance, Brussels (2013). His work has been featured in numerous international group exhibitions, including The Absent Museum, WIELS, Brussels (2017), L’Almanach 16, Le Consortium, Dijon (2016), 2015 Triennial: Surround Audience at the New Museum, New York (2015), the Liverpool Biennial (2014), La Biennale de Lyon 2013, and Pride Goes Before a Fall – Beware of a Holy Whore at Artists Space, New York (2013). The SOTOSO project was an artist-run exhibition space ran by Peter Wächtler and Hans-Christian Lotz in between 2011 and 2014. A book of his texts, Come On, was published in 2013 by Sternberg Press.

On Friday, 18 August 2017, 18:00–20:00, further works by Peter Wächtler will be screened in the exhibition Peter Wächtler: Far Out at Rehnsgatan 3, Stockholm.

The event is realized with generous support by Goethe Institute Sweden.