WELT AM DRAHT
Curated by Antoine Waterkeyn
Did the stage exist before the audience, or did the audience come first? This reversal of the seemingly obvious perturbs assumptions about performance and spectatorship. A stage without an audience feels paradoxical, almost impossible. And yet, this impossibility opens a space for reimagining what the stage could be.
Stripped of its spectators, the stage transforms. It is no longer merely a site of display, but something more ambiguous: perhaps an architectural shell, a sculptural presence, a narrative fragment, or even a provocation. By unbinding it from the audience's gaze, new meanings emerge, not as entertainment, but as potential.
This tension echoes the critique offered by Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle. Debord argued that in modern society, all of life is turned into a spectacle, where individuals no longer act, but watch. Art and performance are not spared; they, too, are absorbed into a system of passive consumption.
The exhibition’s title - Welt Am Draht is adapted from Rainer Werner Fassbinder's limited series ‘World on a Wire’ released in 1973. The series imagines a simulated world nested within another, where the inhabitants of the simulation are unaware of their artificial condition, believing themselves to be autonomous subjects rather than objects of observation. Here, the stage is literalized in the form of reality itself: constructed, performed, and observed from above. The protagonist’s gradual awareness of this structure mirrors the breakdown of the spectacle, where the screen of reality cracks and the machinery behind it becomes momentarily visible.
In parallel to Debord’s analysis of modern art as spectacle, the stage, like all cultural forms, becomes a space constructed for viewing rather than for participation.
But if we imagine a stage without an audience, we challenge this structure. We hint at the reclamation of art as experience rather than image. As Debord saw it, the goal is not to preserve the stage, but to abolish the separation it enforces to reintegrate art into life, and life into action.
Curated by Antoine Waterkeyn, this exhibition presents a dialogue between his vision and the works of Olaf Holzapfel, Frank JMA Castelyns, Suchan Kinoshita, Julla Kroner & Yoni Hong, Devrim Lingnau, Jana Rippmann, Helmut Stallaerts, Mitja Tušek, and Sebastian Volz.
Hanna Júlia Erdősi