KÜNSTLERHAUS

BETHANIEN

Künstler*innen

Hadley + Maxwell

Canada

Drawing a solid line between artifice and sincerity is as intangible as being right all the time. Hadley + Maxwell build a tension between politics and aesthetics, reflecting on issues of taste and its historical construction. The urgency in which they explore these ideas is worked out in their collaborative process. Culling from music culture, vernacular signs, art historical references, and personal narratives, they use language to reposition conventional notions of subjectivity, abstracting personal pronouns.

Their collaboration often involves mediating their formal process by inviting a third person to respond to staged scenarios, which may sustain prolonged relations or develop from one simple question. Using photography, video and sculpture, they confuse these staged relations by formally representing these encounters as objects – objects that are relegated to the realm of representation, but not limited to this process of production.

(Jenifer Papararo)