Disenchanted Labor – Breaking the Spell of Capitalist Reproduction

In their book Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell,  Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers remind us that capitalism is a mystifying practice that conceals conditions of production and is unable to recognize affective labor. The figure of the witch embodies all that capitalist production seeks to negate and outsource: manifestations of the magical or the irrational. “Witches” thus stay in an ambivalent zone of stigmatization and empowerment; they resist traditional gender patterns and production structures as they refuse the appropriation of reproductive bodies, as well as the exploitation of other territories. Witches have posed and still pose a threat to the capitalist societies in which we live. On the one hand, the selected films present the history of attributions and projections onto "witches," mostly women* and queer people, who serve as instruments of exclusion and oppression. On the other hand, the works examine physical, psychological, and ecological spaces where the figure of the witch is reinvented and reclaimed. 

Program

Camille Ducellier, Sorcières, mes soeurs, 2010, 31 min
Vika Kirchenbauer, UNTITLED SEQUENCE OF GAPS, 2020,13 min
Angela Anderson & Ana Hoffner ex-Prvulovic*, Hexenküche (the witch rarely appears in the history of the proletariat), 2021, 42 min

Followed by a conversation with Angela Anderson, Anne Faucheret, and Ana Hoffner ex-Prvulovic*

Angela Anderson is an artist and researcher seeking to challenge patriarchal, settler-colonial narratives and foster inter-species & inter-material solidarity from a queer feminist perspective through the mediums of multi-channel video and sound installation, sculpture and photography.

Anne Faucheret has been a curator at Kunsthalle Vienna since 2014, curating shows including Ana Hoffner ex-Prvulovic* (2021–2022), Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński (2021–2022), Ho Rui An. The Ends of a Long Boom (2021), Hysterical Mining (together with Vanessa Joan Müller, 2019). 

Ana Hoffner ex-Prvulovic* is an artist, researcher, and writer. She* works in and about contemporary art, art-based research, and critical theory. She* recently curated the exhibition Whiteness as Property, which is on view until June 6, 2022.

In cooperation with Kunsthalle Wien