More than 2000 years ago, the Greek poet Antipater of Sidon listed the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the seven most splendid structures of his age. All that remains from across the centuries are the Pyramids of Giza; all other wonders of the world have fallen victim to the gnawing of time, to acts of destruction and disasters. Yet, seven new world wonders have been created since then: the Great Wall of China, the rock city of Petra, the Inca ruins at Machu Picchu, for example. Certainly we could, in addition, note seven world wonders of technical development, the seven wonders of nature, or the seven steps to enlightenment. We humans create wonder, but at the same time we experience the decay of our own achievements, and we are responsible for the destruction of others' wonders. Even what we do not create, what we have received as a gift – like nature – is so far subject to our will to modify that the consequences of the changes cannot be foreseen.
The exhibition [7] Places [7] Precarious Fields installs, in [7] museums and art venues, [7] precarious fields of our society today and discusses them on the basis of chiefly contemporary photographic and video works. In a blend of documentary and artistic works, of murals, projections, installations, showcase works, films and videos, a discursive climate that is also optically visible is to be generated, a climate that meets the requirements for dealing with these themes. The exhibition deals with uprooting, delocalization, alienation, with high-tech production and social control, with real and virtual migration; with aggrandized self-images, highly-strung psyches, inordinate rapacity, with narcissism and loss of self-control, and finally with violence, surveillance and punishment. And, of course, communication and control through photographic images will likewise be a central focus of the project.
Via the works of photographers and artists, the [7] exhibitions intend to look these real situations in the face. Even if every reflection on the real always contains something fictive at the same time: Photography (photographers and artists) has always dealt particularly intensively, in recent decades, with social and economic relationships in today's world. The crucial point of the exhibitions will be that it will not be classic photographic thinking that is brought to bear (pointing its finger, this thinking believes it can name the world's problems and, through naming, solve them), but contemporary and videographic positions that get to work in these critical, precarious fields, that work inside them – questioning, seeking, testing, formulating.
The [7] museums and art venues are given a descriptive system that appears to prescribe order and control in a world in which we are about to lose grip on the co-ordinates: [7.1][7.2][7.3][7.4][7.5][7.6][7.7].
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=133&v=Fw2MoUj-DHM&feature=emb_title
