Under the title Normalerweise, four of the current fellows of the Braunschweig Projects program at the University of Art Braunschweig (HBK) present works that examine how cultural, political, and technological systems inscribe, standardise, and ultimately petrify meaning. Challenging what is considered "normal", they propose alternative, contestatory ways of seeing, sensing, and inhabiting the world.

Normalerweise: To occur ordinarily, as part of a custom or rule, to operate on a schedule, to happen by design, to fall in sync, a calibration towards being unnoticed.

Program

Openings by CLARA IANNI reassembles the animated introductions to mid-20th-century U.S. propaganda films about Latin America, designed by Walt Disney Studios, exposing how narratives of hemispheric unity masked exploitative economic and political agendas.

Why don’t the cops fight each other? by GRAYSON EARLE explores the limits of modification in the game Grand Theft Auto V, revealing how the immutability of police behavior within the game encodes and reinforces cultural assumptions about authority, order, and violence.

In Semiotics of the Home by HSIN-YU CHEN and JESSI ALI LIN, construction machines are cast as inhabitants of a domestic space, completing daily tasks like cooking and cleaning. The gentle gestures enacted by large-scale machines reimagine industrial equipment as bodies in a home rather than the machines that construct the spaces we inhabit daily.

Ridder Thirst by ABRI DE SWARDT reckons with how white supremacy is expressed through, and diminished by, the Eerste River’s course through Stellenbosch. The work counters the German-Namibian ethnographic photographer Alice Mertens's apartheid-era images of white student couples along this river with queer, anti-monumental gestures informed by the Fallist Movements that emerged in the wake of South Africa’s Rhodes Must Fall protests of 2015.

BIPM by HSIN-YU CHEN stages a durational walk filmed on a single roll of Super 8 outside the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures. Through forced synchronicity on film length and time, to question the abstraction of measurement and its embodied experience.

Free of charge

In English