Dicker als Wasser

A matter of fate? The end of the family, a disappearance of kinship relations, but also criticism of rigid family structures – these are recurrent themes of social debate in the modern era. As late as the generation of 1968, the family was understood as a petit-bourgeois community of fate from which one had to break out and which one had to leave behind. Ever new generations have fought against outmoded traditions and entrenched role models in order to try out and establish new forms of living together. Although repeatedly declared a discontinued model, the family nonetheless does not lose its significance for the individual and for society, for nothing shapes us as lastingly as this web of relationships. Family matters are not merely private in nature; they always have a political dimension as well. They are the expression and the motor of changing social structures, in which the classic identity-forming model of living together in a family as a place of security is confronted with numerous upheavals. Conceptions of what may count as family have multiplied accordingly: it can no longer be reduced to biological and legal criteria alone, but can also be regarded as a process, as „doing family“, or as an expanding „patchwork“. Exhibition and book are concerned not only with the many forms of living together but also venture an enquiring look into the future: what significance does family still have today in the face of globalised working conditions and pluralised ways of life? To what extent do networks and friends replace classic family structures? How do biotechnologies, some of them already digitalised, from artificial insemination through to surrogacy, change our traditional understanding of family?

Artists:
Candice Breitz, Omer Fast, Simon Fujiwara, Nan Goldin, Badr el Hammami & Fadma Kaddouri, Verena Jaekel, Haejun Jo, Nina Katchadourian, Ragnar Kjartansson, Neozoon, Johannes Paul Raether, Gillian Wearing, Tobias Yves Zintel

Exhibitions:
Kunstpalais Erlangen, 24/9 – 27/11/2016
Villa Merkel Esslingen 18/12/2016 – 26/12/2017