The Conference

In The Conference the format of the online meeting, familiar since the pandemic, emerges large-scale in the public space. During a time of quarantine and travel restrictions, various landscapes and natural phenomena come together in live online meetings in the empty shop windows of the city. Planet Earth is in constant motion above and below ground and is incessantly transforming.The focus of this live video work is an approach to that earthly network of forces of action and to the question of how the stories of the world can be told. 

Can the deeply ingrained distance and distinction between culturesand natures be diminishedby telling stories that are about the 'mere material' beyond the human mind and the aesthetics of art, appearing in their very own temporality?The temporality ofthings often undercuts the culturally shaped narrative of determination and operates outside the narratological model of time with its inherent tension between developmental progression and finality. With their expansiveness and their incompleteness they undermine the possibility which has been a condition for reception, being able to experience things as impactful and meaningful. Yet, the present is always  also the simultaneity of different times. 

In The Conference the world stages itself and calls upon us, to understand the fascination towards the world of things as the new principle of aesthetics as well as to accept that the world operates  in its own dimensions that we cannot grasp with our human horizons of experience, but which still actively condition our reality.  From this perspective the distinctions between foreground and background,  between the living and the non-living increasingly reveal themselves to be misleading concepts.

11.-17. OCT 20.00-23.00

on display in the window of Anchlussverwendung

Grünberger Straße 22

About the artist

Maria Heidler

Maria Heidler has been living in Berlin as a tailor and freelance hat maker until 2016, after which she returned to her home-town Dresden to study fine arts. Here, she has been work in close relation with Konglomerat Dresden and Tagträumer e.V.In 2019 she took part in creation of the collective Polizeiklasse Dresden, which is still active today. and which takes stand towards political events within and outside of Dresden via multi-medial and performative interventions in public space. Maria spent 2020 in Athens, where she attended Athens School of Fine Arts. 

Her present interest deals with the question, who, on our anthropogenic and eurocentrisitc world-stage, takes on the main role, and who is perceived to be a side-figure or even banned into the background, and how such social "truths" are established. In her artistic practice, she tries to approach tales of a diverse and vivid concrete world, to strive away from conventionalheroic narratives.