Miriam
Stoney / Indebtedness:
Die Haftung der Geschenknehmenden

Mar
26 — May 15, 202

Kevin
Space, Volkertplatz 14, 1020 Vienna

Kunstverein
Kevin Space is pleased to announce Indebtedness:
Die Haftung der Geschenknehmenden,
a new project conceived by Vienna-based writer Miriam Stoney. Often
working collaboratively and primarily textually, Stoney’s practice
includes writing, performance, audio and installation while defying
easy categorization or fixation.

Indebtedness:
Die Haftung der Geschenknehmenden
marks the first exhibition project by Stoney and manifests as an
expanded writing practice and an exercise in non-linear story-telling
as well as vernacular idioms and idiosyncrasies to explore
subjective, inter-generational and gendered historiography. Text,
photography, sculpture and sound here tangibly negotiate fine lines
between nostalgia, critical historicity and attempts to reinstate
alternative perceptions of reality for the present and future. 

The
title of the exhibition encompasses the double meaning of
indebtedness as interdependencies that are both culturally and
economically rooted. It aims at a growing immobility between classes
that is incited particularly sinisterly in the United Kingdom,
although an expanding culture of debts can be experienced throughout
the European mainland. Indebtedness also points to an intersectional
self-reflection of being part of a diaspora as well as to the phantom
limb of inherited family traumas, that are both deeply personal but
also intergenerationally and historically ingrained.

Departing
from Scunthorpe
Correspondences,
a dialogue between Stoney and Tom Glencross, a UK-based writer and
friend, that was conceived and published in the given framework, this
exhibition is set alongside the struggles of the working-class in
Scunthorpe, where both authors grew up. Once a symbol for prosperity
and wealth, the town in northern England now faces widespread
precarity and disenchantment due to the decline of the steel industry
and deregulating, globalizing processes. This conversation as well as
the exhibition interrelate Stoney’s family’s trajectory with
larger colonial histories of the UK and the Partition of Pakistan and
India in 1947. 

Details
of the town of Scunthorpe are visualized in the exhibition through a
selection of Glencross’ black-and-white photographs (Sensual
objects, real qualities),
reminiscent of the social realism of New Objectivity, such as Bernd
and Hilla Becher’s portrayal of decommissioned industrial buildings
and workers’ homes prior to their vanishing. The installation Real
objects, sensual qualities
echoes a ritual performed by Sikh communities in their temples: here,
every night the Guru Granth Sahib (the holy book) is carefully
brought to bed and awakened in the morning, to be carried back to the
prayer hall. Alluding to this ritual, Stoney’s installation
consists of six individualized miniature beds that accommodate a
selection of books grounded in feminist, anti-capitalist and
de-colonial thinking. Interwoven with this 

specific
religious phenomenon are thus educational, cultural and economic
aspirations and expectations, reflected in other aspects of the
exhibition as well as the writings and performances embedded therein:
Better
biographies (Kevin)
is a performative activation of Stoney’s personal archive of letters
from the Student Loans Company, which are signed off by a certain
“Kevin O’Connor.” A phone call with Kevin teases out questions
about debt, responsibility and sociality. 

The
contemporary (self-)reflection of diaspora communities within and
beyond the British context is manifest in the audio installation O
my mother, I am in love with a hawk (Bird)—a
newly-produced Punjabi-diaspora mix by London-based producer and DJ,
Yung Singh, which traces musical forms, such as Bhangra, that
travelled from the Punjab region of India to create novel genres in
new contexts. Stoney’s narrative play extends in Better
biographies (Chests); Homage to Winifred Knights, The
Deluge,
1920 consisting
of a clothesline that is stretched diagonally across the space to
display the signs of affiliation that have adorned her different
stages of life. Sculpture and semiotic pun at the same time, the work
refers to the English phrase of “not airing one’s dirty
laundry”—a common dictum according to which private information
is not to be shared publicly for fear it could damage a family’s
reputation. I
ceased from Mental Fight (Forgive nothing, forget everything)
is a cake baked by the artist. Its icing shows a reinterpretation of
symbols through superimposition, incorporating the Sikh khanda
symbol, the logo of Oxford university and a fragment of Scunthorpe
United’s official emblem, based on an iron girder in a steel
worker’s fist—a playful take on yet another English figure of
speech: “You can’t have your cake and eat it, too”, a phrase
that tries to insist that: “You can’t have it both ways”.

Miriam
Stoney (b. 1994, Scunthorpe, UK) lives and works between Vienna and
London. Stoney studied at the University of Oxford and the Bartlett
School of Architecture, UCL, and is now enrolled at the Academy of
Fine Arts Vienna. Her work has been featured in the programs of: ICA
London, BBC Introducing Arts, Somerset House Studios London, Centre
Pompidou x West Bund Museum Shanghai, KW Institute for Contemporary
Art Berlin and Haus Wien.

The
publication Scunthorpe
Correspondences is
kindly supported by ‘Damnatio Memoriae’ project funding from the
ÖH Kulturreferat of the Hochschüler_innenschaft, Academy of Fine
Arts Vienna.

With
special thanks to Julian Billmair, Sophie
Eidinger, Masimba Hwati, Philipp Lossau, Andrea Zabric,
and Werner
Murrer Rahmen.