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The exhibition Touchpoint. in the studio of the Neue Galerie Graz shows the performative sculptures of performance and media artist Barbis Ruder. As the title already suggests, the show deals with touch points, interaction and direct contact. Ruder investigates the intersections between capitalism and the body, between neo-liberalism and the psyche, which shape our present in an unconsidered and lasting way.
In the eponymous work, she pursues the question of how one can translate gestures of political rhetoric into space, so to say materialise them. In the same way that politics in principle wishes not only to guide a mass, but always to form it, too, so the artist’s hands touch a soft, malleable mass, in a re-enactment of these gestures.
Her finger prints in the silicon cast are the touch points of power. The concern here is literally with the range of words and gestures, and with the so fundamental question of attitude.
