Monitoring – Exhibition for Time-Based Media Art

We live in a world where violence does not disappear – it merely changes form. It seeps into images, sounds, bodies, and the digital realm. Between war news, the climate crisis, and economic and ecological impositions, the absurd becomes the norm. Violence is not a state of emergency, but a quiet constant in our present.

The question is not whether it has an effect, but where and how. In what traces, in what memories, in what archives it lives on. It manifests itself in the cracks in language, in the fatigue of bodies, in the silencing of entire communities; as numbers and scores, as filters and rankings, as synthetic images, as artificial voices. Sometimes it disguises itself as order, as protection, as progress. And often it goes unnoticed – because it has become inscribed in everyday life: in routines, glances, structures, places.

The exhibition brings together 17 works that work with images and sounds, with archives and performative gestures, with monuments, figures, structures, as well as with artificial intelligence processes. In the various exhibition venues – the KulturBahnhof Südflügel, the Kasseler Kunstverein, and the Stellwerk – the artists draw on different strategies: Some train algorithms with digital images or reconstruct suppressed narratives from analog archives in order to expose mechanisms of visibility and omission. Others translate symbols from monuments or state emblems into new contexts, thereby questioning collective memory, body images, and public representation. In manifold ways, the works link personal testimonies with collective narratives and open up moments of listening, sensitivity, and reflection.

In the tense environment of late capitalism, the artists show how the absurdity and normalization of violence – including in digital and algorithmic systems – can be endured, named, and interrupted at the same time. The focus is on right-wing violence, war experiences and biographical wounds, traces that run through history and the present. They reveal how memory can become responsibility – and how retelling forgotten stories creates new forms of closeness and awareness. In the gaps between then and now, a space emerges in which listening becomes action and compassion becomes the possibility of change. Memories that become questions: What truths do (synthetic) images and voices claim? Who speaks when machines or power speak – and who remains unheard? How can identity be conceived without overlooking the other when profiles, scores, and data images are also writing? What forms of closeness, care, and solidarity are possible when systems decide and sort?

unstable memory / unstable power describes the dual movement of our present. Memory remains unstable because it is perpetuated in bodies, archives, and data sets and is therefore never complete, but can always be corrected, questioned, and shared. Power remains unstable because it shifts within infrastructures, scores, rankings, and image regimes, thus eluding view, yet at the same time having to be made visible and negotiable. This instability does not point to a deficiency, but rather opens up a scope for action: it creates a terrain in which listening, care, and contradiction become not only possible, but necessary in order to test new orders. Instability thus becomes a tool of criticism that shakes existing certainties, reveals exclusions, and opens up spaces for negotiation. At the same time, it challenges us to understand responsibility not only as an individual attitude, but as a collective practice – as a process that thrives on the constant questioning, reconnecting, and keeping open of memory and power.

Defne Kizilöz