WO*MAN*KIND
March 15 - April 19, 2025
Kindred Spirits, Lisbon, Portugal
Curated by Stephan Klee of Frontviews, Berlin, 
Germany

Participants: Asef–Burckhardt, Elisa Azevedo, Mit Borrás, Stella Geppert, Thorsten Alexander Kasper, Melissa Steckbauer, & Luo Yang

​“May you live in interesting times”* – Indeed. It’s very hard to doubt it, we are living in interesting times these years. The breakdown of the two piles of globalised, multilateral trading in 2001, the breakdown of the digitalised finance markets in 2008, and the breakdown of an international peace order latest with the re-election of an orange bully as chief in command of the greatest army of the world are quite interesting, but not exciting at all. It’s a cascade, a downfall of any utopian agenda of our current civilisation – and this is just a central western view of the actual development. So, looking around inside the shelter during the storm outside, taking a breath – we ask ourselves what might be the core foundation of our living? What is the crucial, primary base to start from? Where do we gain our power to go on? Where do we see the reasons to live fostering? Where can we let ourselves fall, without being afraid of the collusion at the ground? The group exhibition Wo*man*kind offers an attempt to response to these questions by setting the focus on the “between of you and me”. The selection of artists and artworks here shows human beings close to each other in very open, private and sometimes even intimidate moments. The conceived pieces basically depict close-ups of faces, bodies, shared moments and memories and therefore open access to the experiences of intense longing, keeping close and trust. While doing so, they lay bare inner relations between lovers, partners and family and speak about the fundaments in the life of almost every individual. Fundaments that a lot of people put their trust in, fundaments which give security, hope, strength and joy, fundaments that also can be dismantled from time to times, but this remains for another chapter. In general, this is an exhibition dedicated to desire, tenderness, empathy, the love between wo*men*child as the main inducements behind the great social rhizome, that still holds so many of us on the board of living, that shelters us from deep harm. The art collective Frontviews had the highest sensation, that these times might be the right on for this show.

--Stephan Klee

*Old chinese curse.